Protocol Activation: What Is It, What Apps Offer It, and How Can I use It in My Apps?

TL:DR

Protocol activation is a cool feature you can add to your Windows Store apps, and allows you to make your app more useful as well as more discoverable. For a video demonstration of how easy it is to add protocol activation to your app, skip to the end of the post. Otherwise, read on…

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Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 4

Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:

Developer

Lots of activity from my developer-focused peers…read the whole list…you won’t regret it.

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Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 3

Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:

Developer

Continue reading Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 3

FREE Download – Windows Phone 8 Book

Paul Thurrott, of Supersite for Windows fame, has finished the first edition of his Windows Phone 8 book, which he’s making available for FREE download via his WindowsPhoneBook.com website.

Better still, you can influence future editions of the book by sharing your feedback. Just download the PDF, and drop Paul an email via his About Page (the email is in the about text…out of respect for his inbox, I won’t reprint it directly here) and let him know about any issues you find.

My Site’s Fallen, and it Can’t Get Up!

TL:DR

Short version…some extra traffic crashed my blog last week, thanks to my decision to use cheap shared hosting. In response, I moved my blog to Windows Azure Web Sites, where I can easily scale to meet any traffic spikes. Read on for the background, or skip to “Making the Move” for the technical details.

The Background

Cheap hosting. It lures you in with the siren song of saving lots of money. And for a while, perhaps even a long while, it may give you everything you need. But sooner or later, you find out that you get what you pay for.

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10 Years…and I Missed It!

So, I was doing some research trying to figure out which blogs have implemented the gadget I put together for my Community Megaphone website, so that when I have the time to rearchitect the gadget (hopefully soon, as it could definitely use a refresh), I can notify the site owners of the updated version. Anyway, as part of that process, I ran across my pre-Microsoft blog, over on weblogs.asp.net, and it turns out that I’ve been blogging for over 10 years…wow!

The bummer is, I completely missed my 10 year anniversary of blogging. So I’ll celebrate it belatedly today!

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Quick Tip: Analytics and InPrivate Browsing

Whatever analytics package you use to understand your site traffic, it likely uses cookies or IP addresses to exclude your visits from the statistics. If yours is cookie-based, it’s a good idea (particularly if you’re doing a bunch of edits or other maintenance) to avoid browsing your site using Internet Explorer’s InPrivate mode (or similar modes on other browsers), since it will not send the cookie(s), and as such your visits won’t be excluded.

How do I know this? Often, I’ll have a browser window open in InPrivate mode when I need to use different credentials from my day-to-day browsing, such as for admin tasks on my Azure services.

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East Region Roundup

Wanted to share a few posts from my fellow Microsoft Technical evangelists here in East Region, hopefully you’ll find them as interesting and useful as I did:

That’s all I’ve got for today…I’ll post more links from my peers in future roundups. Let me know if you find these valuable!

WebGL Hello World in IE11

If you’ve been away for a while, you may not have heard that WebGL is supported in Internet Explorer, starting with version 11, currently available as a preview release, either as part of the Windows 8.1 preview, or as a stand-alone release for Windows 7. And I have the proof right here:

CanIUse_WebGL_2

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