Archive
June 13th 2012 Links: Windows 8, Visual Studio, .NET 4.5, Windows Azure
Following the steps of Scott Guthrie’s link-listing series, here’s our new batch of links in our own series:
Windows 8
Delivering Windows 8 Release Preview
Microsoft announces its final pre-release of Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, and Windows 8 apps (Hotmail, SkyDrive, Messenger, etc.).
Learn to build Metro style apps
Thinking of developing a Windows 8 Metro application? You’ll find all what you need here!
A World of Samples at your Fingertips
Microsoft Windows 8 samples
Visual Studio
Visual Studio 2012 RC available
Visual Studio 2012 RC is available!
Microsoft’s reasoning about their all-caps menu in Visual Studio 2012 (?!!!).
My Favorite Features: Creating Storyboards with PowerPoint
A sweat feature: use PowerPoint to create your Windows 8 Metro app storyboards!
Dev
What’s New in the .NET 4.5 Base Class Library
This article covers the big (and some of the small) improvements made to the BCL in the .NET Framework 4.5.
Scott Guthrie unveils the new Windows Azure 
Cheers,
Carl Anderson
LogToMail
As part of the SoftFluent product team, I’m proud to officially announce our new product: LogToMail!
LogToMail is a light program (the whole thing is less than 1 MB), which can run as a Windows Service or in command line, and which monitors the event log of a server.
Whenever a new entry is logged, it can send an email with the content of the log entry to the appropriate person.
Defining which type of entries should trigger an email (all by default) and to whom (default is the administrator email specified at installation time) can be done through the configuration file of the tool. To be more precise, rules are defined using the JavaScript language.
For instance, the following rule sends an email to user1, user2 and user3, when an error log event other than the 1058 and 1126 is written to the event log:
<rule name="SendToUsers" sendFrom="logtomail@softfluent.com" sendTo="user1@example.com,user2@example.com,user3@example.com" sendFromDisplayName="LogToMail '#::Environment.MachineName#'">
(Event.EventType == 1) && (Event.EventCode != 1058) && (Event.EventCode != 1126)
</rule>
We’ve actually been using this tool internally for years to ensure we don’t miss issues on our servers; it turned out to be so useful that we thought it might help others than us 
There’s a free evaluation version (limited to 30 days) which is available here if ever you want to try it out 
Hope this helps,
Carl Anderson
CodeFluent Entities SQL Azure producer is Windows Azure Certified
We announced last week the official support of the Microsoft SQL Azure producer, a new CodeFluent Entities producer that generates ready-to-use SQL Azure code from your CodeFluent Entities model. Furthermore, you can also choose to store your Binary Large Objects (BLOBS) in your database or in your Windows Azure Blob Storage account: it’s all up to you!
We successfully passed today the test on the Microsoft Platform Ready website in order to certify the generated SQL Azure code. I am happy to share this nice Powered by Windows Azure logo 
:
This latest test gives to CodeFluent Entities its 3rd Microsoft Platform Ready certification after Windows 7 and Microsoft SQL Server.
Don’t hesitate to download CodeFluent Entities right now and enjoy Microsoft SQL Azure!
Omid.
