November 21st, 2012 — TouchDevelop: Tips and Types for Programming via Touch — Tom Ball

Time and Location

November 21, 2012 at 7:00 PM
Microsoft Campus.
Building 41/1511–Townsend

Abstract

TouchDevelop brings a modern programming experience to devices where touch is the primary input mechanism, such as smartphones and tablets. The TouchDevelop environment does this through an interlocking set of features, including:

  • a simple statically-typed scripting language;
  • syntax-directed editing with a context-sensitive virtual keyboard;
  • code completion and refactoring features;
  • integrated search of platform APIs;
  • cloud-based sharing, searching, and synthesis of code.

In this talk, I’ll demonstrate the TouchDevelop Web App and focus on some of the unique features of the TouchDevelop language, including support for client/cloud shared data. Additionally, I’ll describe how the TouchDevelop Web App was written in TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. The TouchDevelop web application is a complete rewrite of the C#/XAML-based TouchDevelop application for Windows Phone.

Bio

Thomas (Tom) Ball is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research Redmond, where he works in the area of software engineering, having made contributions in program profiling, software model checking, and empirical software engineering. Tom is a 2011 ACM Fellow.

Resources

Video | Slides