Hello, Azure App service and Azure SQL are the way to go, no worries with maintenance and so easy to deploy, integrate with VS, production/staging slot etc... It is the future. VMs are to be used for more complex scenarios. Just one thing, if it is for your neighbour I suspect it's not going to be a very demanding app in which case I would not use an S1 instance but rather a Shared D1 or maybe just a free F1. The D1 costs €0.011 as opposed to €0.085/hour for the S1. Also regarding SQL server you may want to choose a small basic instance which costs €0.0851/hour If needed you can always scale up in no time, that's the beauty of Azure! Anyway, I think it works out to be about 70 euro a month. Thanks

Where do they get their figures from? - In London the AVERAGE salary is way lower than claimed. Actually, according to payscale -which I beleive is more reliable- it is just about £38k. Software Developer Salary in London, England: London (United Kingdom)[^]

It's free library! You get what you pay for... If you want 0 dependencies, you can always write it yourself and make it available on nuget for everybody to enjoy.

Really cool! Xamarin is great, Xamarin Forms is awesome, still a lot of bugs and room to improve but nevertheless AWESOME!! Only the price was a real turn off. :-D

Excellent news! Can't wait to see Xamarin part of the MSDN license... That will save a few grands a year ;)

It's not just you. I upgrade 4 of my PCs to windows 10, 3 work perfectly and one is just a total nightmare! I suspect it is a problem in the Amd Radeon video driver. I tried upgrading as well as a clean install and it is pretty unstable, to say the least!

Hmmm... The method is flawed IMO. For example, DB-Engine calculates an index by (I quote) "searching for together with the term database, e.g. "Oracle" and "database"." Lets try it out: Google "SQL server database" => 35.4 million results Google "Oracle database" => 19.7 million results They also claim to look at google trends... So that's what I found in Google trends for December 2015: SQL Server database index = 42 Oracle Database index = 27 They also say they use Stackoverflow... SQL server Tag: 151708 Oracle Tag: 64616 Get the idea? It looks like Oracle is not as widely mentioned as they worked it out. (and that matches my experience of the market!) And my last point is that they are sponsored by Solid-It, a development/consultancy company who are in Java/NoSQL business stuff... enough said! conflict of interests springs to mind! This kind of article should be published in the Daily Mail (If you are from the UK you know what I mean...)

It works by writing unit tests or even better, using test driven development... Anyway what's wrong with testing your own code? - Everybody tests their own code! do you really hand over your code to QA without at least making sure it works? I alway test what I write.

In the UK there's the Land Rover 360 Camera System. It's pretty close to what you describe. Not sure if it's available in the US.

I could not agree more. I would just add that code reviews are a great way to learn. I enjoy being shown where my code could be improved! Valery.

There is already an extension that does that (and a bit more...) Look for MarkdownComments in the tools/Entensions and update menu.

There use to be a free 20Mb database option but they've stopped it. So no free option anymore. You can either use the database offer or create a VM with SQL Server express on it.

I don't know where you got this amount of $50 a month from but it is actually way less. I have about 10 Azure pay as you go sites and my last bill was $0.12 I also use Visual Studio Online for free. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/[^]

Selenium is really good, especially if you use WebDriver and not the player/recorder in Firefox. The default environment Java/Eclipse is (in my opinion) a right pain in the neck. Instead I use Selenium in Visual Studio writing all the tests in c# in standard unit test projects. It as it limitations and mainly I use it for smoke tests/regression tests or to get to a certain point in manual testing. I found it helpful to write a whole bunch of webdriver extension methods and create some code snippets. This makes it a breeze to write tests that are readable and that my testers can use without being programmers. Another thing to consider is giving an ID to all your UI elements, it removes the pain form having to write an XPath filter. The Selenium tests are triggered during continuous integration at check-in time and it just works... nugget makes it easy to find the right packages, I use diverse Selenium Webdrivers (internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox) so the test are ran against a decent variety of browsers. Selenium is great and easy to use but if Selenium does not cut it for you, you may find Telerik Test Studio a good solution but it's quite expensive. I don't have the time to write any article but maybe I should go to bed later, it's a great subject. ;) Valery.

They are backed up on the cloud somewhere and you can get them back... but only on a WinPhone device, if you want to get them back on anything else you just can't. Microsoft in their great commercial wisdom are trying to lock you in the Winphone world by allowing your data in but not out.

The phone itself and the OS are ok, actually very snappy and fast! BUT... if you try to switch back to Android (or iOS) you are in for some troubles! for example you can never get your SMS back, you can't even export them! I tried WinPhone, I liked the OS but I hated the fact that Microsoft tried to lock me in WinPhone with nasty tricks like the impossibility to export SMS! I'm back to Android and glad I did.

That's a good news... it seems that beer has the same effects! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2799519/a-pint-beer-day-double-men-s-fertility-coffee-vegetarian-cuts-odds-conceiving.html[^]

My bank wanted the same c**p installed. It is a nasty piece of junk, it slows down everything. I uninstalled it and now my browser is back to normal.

I have a Lenovo G770 with a 240GB SSD, 8gb of ram. It is simply the best PC I have ever had, lightning fast! less than 30 seconds to boot, and another 20 seconds for Visual Studio to fully load. The keyboard layout is a bit quirky but I got use to it pretty quickly. I'll never ever go back to the corporate Dells I use to have! Even if the keyboard is the best in the world.

The ultimate Geek video!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLO1djacsfg&feature=kp[^] :-D :-D :-D Sorry if it is a re-post.