Like many in the Microsoft dev community, I’m a heavy user of Visual Studio and Powershell. And so, of course, I’ve been a heavy user Chris Tavares’ vsvars32.ps1 script. However, recently I needed the ability to specify my desired processor architecture when setting up a VS command line session. Unfortunately, Chris’s script wraps vsvars32.bat which only supports generating 32-bit apps. Luckily, VC++ includes a vcvarsall.bat script that let’s you specify processor architecture. So I updated my local copy of vsvars.ps1  to use vcvarsall.bat under the hood and added an -x64 switch to enable setting up a 64-bit command line environment. Vcvarsall.bat supports a variety of additional options, but 64-bit support is all I needed so that’s all I added. I didn’t change the name of the script because there’s WAY too much muscle memory associated with typing “vsvars” to bother changing that now.

If you want it, you can get my architecture aware version of vsvars.ps1 from my OneDrive here: http://1drv.ms/1kf8g9I.

As you might imagine, I had a pretty amazing time @ Build. The only thing that went wrong all week was when one of my demos in my session failed. It’s was pretty cool demo – the brokered WinRT component fires an event which wakes up a suspended WinRT app for a few seconds to process the event. However, I had shut off toast notifications on my machine, which messed up the demo. So here, for your enjoyment, is a short 3 minute video of the working demo.

Wow, it’s been a whirlwind couple of days down here in San Francisco @ Build 2014. It has certainly been a huge thrill for me, getting a chance to be a part of the day one keynote and getting 15 minutes of fame. However, as the conference winds down I wanted to pull together a summary of the stuff Microsoft announced that relates to enterprise app development and Windows 8.1 Update. I mean, it wasn’t all about my wardrobe choices…

The Windows for Business blog as a good summary post that hits the highlights. The stuff I wanted to specifically call out is:

• We’ve changed the policy to allow side loaded apps to communicate with desktop apps. Literally every single enterprise customer, Microsoft dev consultant and enterprise technical sales rep I’ve spoken to in the last year has asked for this.
• We’ve added a feature in Windows 8.1 Update to enable side loaded apps to run code outside of the App Container. This opens up side loaded apps to access the full power of Windows as well as all the existing code the enterprise may have in its portfolio
• We’ve made it significantly easier to get side load rights. I’d go thru the specifics here, but Rocky Lhotka (who has been very vocal about the issues in this space) had a great summary: “For a maximum of around $100 virtually every organization (small to huge) can get a side loading unlock key for all their devices.”

If you want more information on how to take advantage of these new features for side loaded apps, here are some resources for you:

• In addition to my 5 minutes in the keynote, I did a whole session where I drilled into more details on that demo. I also demos that used network loopback for interprocess communication.
• John Vintzel and Cliff Strom had a session on deploying enterprise apps. As of this writing, the video isn’t online yet but it will be within a day or two at that URL.
• We have published whitepapers on both Brokered WinRT Components and using network loopback in WinRT apps that go into more details on how to build solutions with this technology
• Last but not least, we have a set of samples of sideloaded WinRT apps. This includes the keynote demo, another brokered component demo and the WCF & ASP.NET network loopback demos I did in my session. Note, the keynote demo sample is packaged oddly because of the way MSDN’s sample repo handles (or in this case doesn’t handle) VS solutions with multiple projects. When I get back to Redmond, I’m  going to see if there’s a better way to get this sample hosted.

I heard many times over the past two days from folks in person at the conference and via email, twitter, facebook, carrier pigeon, etc just how excited they are about these changes & features. As an engineer who spends most of his days in his office and or in meetings building this stuff, it is amazingly gratifying to hear directly from our users how much our work can help them.

Today was a *HUGE* thrill as I got to present in the keynote at //build! I’ll have more on the specifics of Brokered WinRT Components later after my session, but apparently quite a big deal was made of my shirt. I ended up as an internet meme and on the CNN Live Blog!

A long, long time ago (back when I wrote Photoshop Plugins for Mac long before I joined Microsoft), I had a Metrowerks CodeWarrior t-shirt with the “Blood Sweat & Code” slogan on the back. I loved that slogan, but lost the shirt somewhere along the way. So a few months ago, I decided to make a new one – but this time with the purple and blue of Visual Studio’s brand instead of CodeWarrior yellow. When I got a chance to be a part of the //build keynote today, I figured it was a good wardrobe choice.

For those who want one of their own, I posted the design on Zazzle.