I have a mixed WebForms/MVC web project that worked fine in Visual Studio 2012, but failed horribly when I moved to Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate. All of my WebAPI’s stopped working. Apparently there are changes to routing with the latest Visual Studio release. Previously you did not have to manually specify route information if you were using attribute routing, and now you do. It says that more changes are coming too: http://blogs.

Due to a cancelled flight, and other delays, we missed the first day of the Hackathon, but we weren’t deterred. A coworker and I embarked on an ambitious Windows Phone/Azure application that, while incomplete, proved to be a great learning experience. Our Windows Phone 8 application was similar to “The Amazing Race” where a player had to complete various checkpoints, and the first player to complete them all, wins. At each checkpoint, the player would have to answer trivia based on the geographic location of that checkpoint.

One month in to my side project, and It’s going well. I now have a name for it, however, I’m not ready to disclose it until it goes live. The concept is simple: You enter in your assets & debts, it plots out some charts/graphs about your net worth, and then its publicly available for anyone/everyone to see. If everything goes smoothly, I’m hoping to be ready to launch at the end of May.

Last weekend, a family member stopped by the house so I could take at an issue with her laptop. I managed to recreate the error, and fired up my work laptop so I could “Bing it”. (Yes, I wear that like a badge of honor!). At the login prompt, I banged away on the keyboard, hit enter, and was dropped into the “Formerly-Known-As-Metro” interface. At this point I hit Window-D to get into the familiar Windows Desktop interface, but was instead mocked with a beeping sound for each keystroke I typed.

I participated in the hackathon at Microsoft Build 2012 and made it to the finals. My project was the old card game, Speed. It was the first time I’d ever coded with graphics, and definitely the first time I’d ever written code for a touchscreen. I was proud of what I’d built in my spare time between sessions, and incredibly happy to have made it to the finals considering I was a team of one.