I have some time management issues, don’t we all? Lately, I’ve been trying using the Pomodoro Technique to overcome the little distractions that can easily scupper a good work day. The biggest issue I (and many others) have with implementing the technique is also the central focal point; The timer. A timer is essential… preferably [...]
Early in the Silverlight 4 in Action book, there is an example to work through; Creating a Twitter client with Silverlight. Just the fact that the author can use this as a “hello world” style example gives the reader a little indication of how powerful Silverlight is for building web apps. However, somewhere along the [...]
>I’ve been reading through Pete Brown’s Silverlight 4 in Action. Having only got to the first few chapters, I can’t say much about it yet, but it does have a very good introduction to the technology. Tripping and stumbling my way through the process of learning to write Silverlight applications, I have already come across a [...]
Recently, I’ve taken the time to look into both the jQuery and MooTools Javascript libraries. The similarities and differences between the two have been expanded upon before in some depth, but I think that a more brief summary is in order. jQuery does a great job of making plain HTML richer, especially if you make [...]
The problem If you ever see this kind of output from your application: “These are not Joe’s quotes†When you expected to see: “These are not Joe’s quotes” Then you have an issue with Unicode that may be solvable by inserting a byte order mark at the start of your output. See the Wikipedia link [...]
Problem Any web application has pages that should be seen by some users and not by others. At the very least, there are administrative pages and public pages. In the past, I’ve always used ad-hoc code when generating pages to determine which links (or tabs, labels etc.) should show up for which user. In ASP.NET [...]
Having seen the Scotts' Gu and Hanselman announce the new version of Entity Framework (Magic Unicorn edition, no less), I thought I’d add some of the new ‘Code First’ goodness to learning / example app. Here are a few things to be aware of when getting used to EF, especially the new release: Entity Framework: [...]
I’ve been reading the very informative ASP.NET MVC 2 In Action. This book contains a lot of information to be aware of if you are using (or planning to use) the MVC framework, however, don’t expect a gentle introduction to starting out in web applications. What’s good: This is a goldmine for finding out [...]
As has been posted on a few other blogs, there are some features of ASP.NET MVC 2 Futures that don’t play nicely together. Two features in particular are the validation (both MS Ajax and JQuery) and the generic form methods. Here’s a (working) example of a very simple form with the plain, non-generic MVC method: [...]
The hardest bugs to fix in software development are often concurrency problems. That is, bugs which are hard to find as they rely on multiple events occurring at overlapping intervals – often impossible to recreate reliably. With web applications, such as ours, the most straightforward way of replicating these problems so that they can be [...]