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Xcode 13 beta is available now!

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The first day of WWDC ’21 has come and gone, which means that the beta for the upcoming version of Xcode is available now!

If you’ve been itching to try out the new Xcode (and especially the new SwiftUI), you can get it at Apple’s Developer site’s Downloads page. It’s currently installing on my machine as I write this.

Let’s do this.

Just a quick warning if this is your first time working with Xcode: the installation process can take a while. On my Auth0-issued 2019 MacBook Pro (2.6 GHz 6-core i7, 16 GB RAM), it took about a half hour or so to unzip itself into a functioning application.

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Office 365 Public Beta: Available Now!

office 365

The news is all over online – perhaps you saw the PC World article or the official Microsoft announcement – Office 365 is out as a public beta and ready for you to take it for a spin! It’s the successor to BPOS, Business Productivity Online Suite and gives you productivity goodies such as:

Here’s a diagram that gives you the 10,000-foot view of what Office 365 can do for you (click to get the full-size version):

office 365 poster

If you’d like to get the public beta of Office 365, office365.ca is the place to go! You’ll find out more about the various packages available for business, from small businesses who want to get stuff done but don’t have the IT department or infrastructure, up to the biggest enterprises looking to integrate Office 365 with their own infrastructure for that special you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter IT goodness.

There’s also the Office 365 Blog and the Office 365 Technical Blog, which show you how to best take advantage of Office 365 tools as well as performing advanced tasks and troubleshooting issues. If you’re the competitive type, there’s the Ready for Work contest where you can win $50,000, a one-year subscription to Office 365 for your business and more – and all you have to do is share your Office 365 success story on our Facebook group.

win 50000

Go for it – sign up for the Office 365 beta now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Now in Beta: Windows Phone Developer Tools!

Devvin' for Seven: Windows Phone 7 DevelopmentThe announcement went out earlier today: the Windows Phone Developer Tools have moved from the CTP ("Community Technical Preview”) phase to Beta (“Almost There!”). As Brandon Watson wrote in the Windows Phone Developer Blog, “This Beta release represents the near final version of the tools for building applications and games for Windows Phone 7.”

Go ahead, go and download it! Click the big graphic link below. You know you want to.

click here to download wp7 developer tools beta

Make sure you uninstall previous versions of Windows Phone Developer Tools before you install the beta.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Taking Windows 7 for a Spin

windows_7_ultimate_installer

I had my first look at the next version of Windows – Windows 7 – at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles back in October, a week after I joined the company. By the powers vested in me as a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, I got my paws on an installer for a recent beta edition and a spare machine – a Dell Latitude D830 with a 2GHz Core Duo processor and 4GB RAM — on which to take the new operating system for a test run.

The installation of the Windows 7 beta went considerably better than my experience installing the Windows Vista beta back in 2006: this time, it worked.

setup_is_preparing_windows

Over the next little while, I’m going to spend some time – perhaps a day a week – doing actual daily work on the Windows 7 machine in order to really experience it. It’ll also give me a chance to try out some “developing for Windows 7” example code. I’ll post my observations here on Global Nerdy – at least as much as the non-disclosure rules allow.

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