Jon Galloway

It’s a new year! Even though years are an arbitrary construct and all that, you feel reinvigorated! Alive! Ready to take on the world! And you’ve read all those posts and tweets and instatumblrs about blogging! They’re pretty compelling, really, and you’re in a suggestible state of mind. You’re thinking about taking the plunge.

I'm really excited to announce that two of my latest courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy are now live! Both are recordings of live courses Christopher Harrison and I lead in the beautiful Channel 9 studios, and include downloads of all slides, code and live chat logs.

NuGet Package Restore allows you to reference NuGet packages in your project without shipping them with your source code or committing them to source control. The general idea is that the packages are restored - that is, downloaded and installed - into your project when it is build. This offers a number of benefits, including better interaction with source control and smaller code distributions.

UPDATE: The course (including videos, slides, and links to the code) are published here: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/introduction-to-asp-net-mvc

Between releases of my other book (Professional ASP.NET MVC, next release due out soon!) Jesse Liberty somehow talked me into collaborating with him on writing a book on Windows 8.1 development. Actually, it wasn't a hard sell, because I've done a good amount of XAML dev, love C#, and Windows 8 / 8.1 development is a lot of fun. We co-wrote the table of contents, I wrote code samples and very rough drafts (sometimes just bullet points), and Jesse turned it into prose. That worked pretty well, but was a little too slow - especially once my work on Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 ramped up. Fortunately, Phil Japiske agreed to join us and finish the book off. Phil really nailed it - he polished off the remaining chapters, reviewed and greatly improved the existing chapters, and made sure everything was up to date for Windows 8.1.