Welcome stranger, sit down by the fire and let us hear the epic deeds, the tales of joy, of woe and of note that occurred these past seven days.

Hello guys! This month I had the idea to read Refactoring, Improving the Design of Existing Code, turn its examples into Katas and relax in general. But I am afraid I am going to have to pivot and change plans :). Refactoring is a great book, and I will write a separate article about my impressions in my next reading digest, but it is too elementary. It is the kind of book I would have loved to read at the very start of my career, but today, most of its teachings I have ingrained in my programmers’ soul and use as instinctively as breathing.

Instead my plan is to merge December’s and January’s Barbaric Monthly and build my first Windows 8 app. How does that sound? :)

I am going to start brainstorming and prototyping today. In the meantime, I leave you with some super interesting stuff I have been listening/viewing/reading lately:

Epic Podcasts

• Dan North Deals with Uncertainty at .NET Rocks
• Why C++ with Herb Sutter on Hanselminutes
• Miguel Castro Rethinks UIs for Windows 8 on The Tablet Show
• Chanse Arrington unpacks Nokia on AppBizDev Podcast with special mention to DVLUP, Nokia’s latest initiative to encourage developers to develop for Windows Phone.

Epic Courses

• Generation App. An Expert-guided 30-day Voyage of App Development for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8
• Windows Phone 8 Jump Start videos and related resources

The Barbaric Development Toolbox is a series of posts where I write about awesome and indispensable tools and libraries that enhance productivity and make our lives as software developers much easier and enjoyable.

I was doing some coding yesterday that involved some unit testing, and all the while I was thinking… “Damn, NCrunch is freaking awesome”, “test, code, test, code”, “red, green, red, green”, “aaaawesome”, “this is a tool everyone should have in their toolbox and enjoy”, “but wait… I do have a blog where I can write whatever I want, and…”. And thus, here we are, I hereby inaugurate a new section in the blog: The Barbaric Development Toolbox, for the betterment of every Software Developer’s life :).

But I will not start with NCrunch, because if I had to recommend one and only one tool to any .NET developer my choice would definitely be ReSharper, probably the most renowed productivity plug-in for Visual Studio. This tool has single-handedly increased my productivity with Visual Studio tenfold and I can’t imagine using Visual Studio without it :).

But @hhariri can show it better than I, take a look at the video below and discover Why ReSharper is Awesome:

If you are not yet convinced take a look at ReSharper’s full feature catalog and download the free 30-day trial. Believe me, just try it out, start learning a shortcut per day (CTLR+T could be the first), and at the end of that month you will be in awe at the difference in productivity.

Ups… Malin just came to the mancave to kick my butt and drag me to bed :) Cheers!

P.S. I am not getting a dime for this. I am just doing it because ReSharper is an absolutely outstanding tool.

I woke up this morning and was about to add my daily goals to Evernote… last note read 2012-11-30, look at the current date and damn! It’s December already! Where did November go? Where did 2012 go? :)

Anyhow, December is upon us! This month I have decided not to do a barbaric monthly, instead I will focus on reading, learning and practicing. I will start by finishing reading Martin Fowler’s Refactoring and turning its refactoring exercises into Code Katas at GitHub. Hopefully I will find some extra time to delve into other stuff, blog, increase the size of my teeny tiny Wiki, write a trial version of quiz4couples… and Chill!

Have a great weekend you all!

Book shopping spree!!!

This morning I was browsing the Pragmatic Bookshelf’s catalog and end up buying a bunch of books:

• Designed for Use
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
• Seven Databases in Seven Weeks
• Technical Blogging
• The Agile Samurai
• The Passionate Programmer
• The ThoughtWorks Anthology
• The ThoughtWorks Anthology, Volume 2

All came with a 40% discount using the coupon: turkey. This offer stands from 23rd to 26th of November, so take a look at the Pragmatic Bookshelf before it is over! And don’t forget to check out Apress’ any book for 15$ deal on Monday.

P.S. Btw, did you know that you can follow Minecon 2012 live at GameSpot? (I am shocked about the huge ecosystem that Mojang managed around Minecraft! Kudos!)

Hi folks! :)

Thought I would write a little bit about what I am doing to market quiz4couples, tips, tricks and interesting resources that I have found so far that may be useful to you when you market your app.

1. Create a Landing Website For Your App

The first thing I wanted to do was to have a central hub for marketing quiz4couples where people could find out about the app, but also, and perhaps more important, where users could contact me and influence quiz4couples roadmap and development. I thus created apps4couples.com (also quiz4couples.com) this last week, which at present it is just a static website and which I will continue developing adding some super basic CRM functionality (controversial decision) in the upcoming weeks.

For this particular website I bought and customized a twitter bootstrap template at WrapBootstrap.com. As a software developer with a full-time job I have veeery very few time to work on side projects, so I really need to pick my battles, and if I can get the job done to a certain quality standard with 15$ and an hour of investment, then that’s great :).

There are a Gazillion other options for creating quick websites, choose the one that you are the most familiar with (come on, you are a developer after all xD) and rock on! Also, don’t forget to take a look at Scott Hanselmans’ first windows phone app experience for more great tips.

2. Engage With Social Media and The Windows Phone Community

The fastest, easiest, cheapest thing you can probably do to start marketing your app is to leverage social media. You most surely already have a twitter, facebook, google+, linkedin, etc account, use them to spread the word. Next, write an informal press release and send it out into the windows phone community: wpcentral, wmpoweruser, everythingWM, Windows Developer Show, and any other media source that you can find. The press release should include:

• Name and description of the app
• Screenshots
• Video if you have made one
• Price and whether it has a trial or not (statistics show that apps with trials sell on average 70 times more than apps without)
• Windows Phone Badge with link to the actual app :)

3. Build a Community

This is huge: Taking care of your users, listening to them, making them feel that you care and that you are approachable, that they can influence the development of that app that you made and they love and find super useful or fun. I will definitely be working on this :)

A Note about Nokia’s Marketing-In-A-Box

An interesting tip I got from the AppBizDev podcast was the existence of Nokia’s Marketing-In-A-Box, a windows phone app marketing bundle for dummies :):

It comes with a 40 page app marketing crash-course guide (which I haven’t had the chance to read so far) and with a series of digital resources that allow you to create a website, facebook tab, video and banners, all super streamlined and taking advantage of the resources you already have in the windows store marketplace. The video is a liiiittle bit cheesy and the app screenshots don’t fit in 100%:

But the banner making tool was pretty nifty:

Other Interesting Resources

• Windows Phone Store Badges

God I am tired… xD Three hours awake and I feel like going back to sleep xDD

Cheers!