I’ve been testing\evaluating ComponentOne’s Studio for ASP.NET Wijmo suite for an MVC 3 project and I’m quickly becoming a fan! This product has so many things going for it that I’m not sure where to start. I’m going to focus on the Wijmo components, but the suite also contains a set of controls for ASP.NET WebForms development. If the Webform controls are as good as the MVC controls, they’re worth a look. There are two versions of the Wijmo components. An open source version containing 30 widgets...
In a previous posting, I discussed replacing the stock MVC serializer used for the JsonResult exposed when you use the controller method Json(..) instead of View. This was all find and dandy. But how – you may wonder – can I call actions that contain complex parameters? Do I need a special binder? Should I write my own? The answer is mostly "no". As Phil Hack blogged, the ASP.NET MVC framework already contains value providers that take care of that for you. All you need to do is ensure that your...
So lately I have been back in the dev arena more so and working from home. I find that I have some spare time because sometimes I pile directly through lunch. Today I was playing around with a control that I felt I had tested thoroughly. I was completely wrong. So here is an explanation of how to build out the accordion control in a webpart without having the same issues. First off go here and download the jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.min.js and jquery-1.6.2.min.js. Then what I want you to do is create...
My collegue told me that placing the opening curly brace at the end of the line is safer than at the beginning of the new line, because it prevents some hard-to-debug errors, related to Automatic Semicolon Insertion and pointed me to the article Basic JavaScript Part 6: Automatic Semicolon Insertion. The article has the recommendation Trying to outline curly braces at the end of the line can save you some headaches in case a semicolon is forgotten somewhere in the code.The statement is misleading...
Alexander Bautz solved the problem neatly. A CEWP with a simple JavaScript function. Hurray Alex...
A little more than three months ago, Microsoft hosted the //build/ conference at which they unveiled the upcoming version of Windows (commonly called Windows 8, though I don’t know if the marketing folks have accepted the fact that that is the name most of us are expecting for it yet). They released to the developer world a build of it called the Windows Developer Preview (and Windows Server Developer Preview) along with various tools for creating the new “Metro style” apps. I wasn’t able to make...
The C#/.NET Fundamentals series is geared towards examining fundamental concepts in using C# (and .NET in general) to produce effective solutions. I wanted to attempt a brief post before the holidays, so I decided to quickly revisit part a post I wrote a few weeks back on The Generic Func Delegates, and in particular, the sidebar on using Func as a generator for unit testing. At the time, I did not give that short sidebar the attention I really wanted, including showing the setup of the unit tests...
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At http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... there is an excellent deal of programming books including how to buy for the geek in your life:The hardest person on your list to shop for is Andrew. Why? Because he just won't tell you what he needs or wants. It's not because he doesn't want anything; it's just that telling you isn't logical. If he needs it or wants it, he'll get it himself, right? In the meantime, you're left with trying to figure out the perfect gift for someone who spends...
Recently (as in, last night) I started playing with jQuery Mobile. My experiences with jQuery, while occasionally frustrating, have been overwhelmingly positive. So when a friend mentioned jQuery Mobile to me, I figured I'd give it a try. A little Googling revealed some helpful tutorials and other resources, one of which was this handy basic page (which I got from here) <!DOCTYPE html><html><hea... Title</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.co...
I remember myself a tweet from Scott Hanselman a couple of months ago, where he asked us to check out a small application he wrote. As one of the first testers of his new "thing", I was interested but there were no documentation or libs available yet. A couple of days a go, I read a blogpost from Maarten Balliauw about SignalR. (Maarten's blog). Because I allready heard about SignalR a couple of months ago, I had to develop a very small application to test how it really works. 1. Install SignalR...
So, to step back up on my soapbox for a quick moment. The buzz and the noise around jQuery and Client Side development in general is growing and at a fairly rapid pace. This of course is good and bad. It’s good because our applications are becoming more and more user friendly and the visual appeal is increasing exponentially a well. Plus, as developers, we get to develop some pretty awesome functionality that before we would have had to crack open Visual Studio to get the same results. It’s definitely...
Don’t miss out on these great session with Markus Egger in the Dallas office! Where: Microsoft Dallas Office – 7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Dallas, TX 75039 When: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 – 1:30 – 4:30 PM Signup for this FREE event in Dallas Join Markus Egger, Microsoft RD and one of the longest running MVPs, for an afternoon of free information. CODE Magazine and EPS Software are in a unique position to share information based on real world experience in projects that are either our own...
The C#/.NET Fundamentals series is geared towards examining fundamental concepts in using C# (and .NET in general) to produce effective solutions. There are times when we are writing a method that returns a sequence of items, that it occasionally becomes necessary in base-class, interface implementation, error, or default conditions to return a sequence of only one or even zero items. There are many ways to do this, of course, which begs the question of which way is best, in terms of readability,...
It’s pretty widely accepted (and common sense) that if you’re putting a site out into the wild – such a simple task as minifying CSS and JavaScript files can save a bunch of load time, especially on mobile devices. I’ve been playing about with this today and was quite happily using jsmin as described here until I noticed that in IE 7 and IE 8 the minified CSS didn’t work. The problem seems to be when using a background style, it takes out the space between the image url close bracket and the next...
My newest course was published yesterday on Pluralsight on KnockoutJS. The course can be viewed here. It is divided up into 4 modules. The first module gives an introduction to Knockout and shows a “Beyond Hello World” demo. The second module discusses the different types of observables you have in Knockout and demos of each. The third module focus on bindings including templating and custom bindings. The fourth module brings everything together with data features while shows a few more advanced...
Today’s $13.99 Deal of the Day from O’Reilly at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... is Head First HTML5 Programming “HTML has been on a wild ride. Sure, HTML started as a mere markup language, but more recently HTML’s put on some major muscle. Now we’ve got a language tuned for building web applications with Web storage, 2D drawing, offline support, sockets and threads, and more. And to speak this language you’ve got to go beyond HTML5 markup and into the world of the DOM, events, and...
The C#/.NET Fundamentals series is geared towards examining fundamental concepts in using C# (and .NET in general) to produce effective solutions. A couple of posts ago, I discussed the EventHandler<TEventArgs> and EventHandler delegates, and in particular at one point mentioned in a sidebar that you need to watch out for thread-safety in order to safely raise events in a multi-threaded environment. There was an interesting discussion in the comments about different ways that people achieve...
Using a simulated dialog window is a nice way to handle inline data editing. The jQuery UI has a UI widget for a dialog window that makes it easy to get up and running with it in your application. With the release of ASP.NET MVC 3, Microsoft included the jQuery UI scripts and files in the MVC 3 project templates for Visual Studio. With the release of the MVC 3 Tools Update, Microsoft implemented the inclusion of those with NuGet as packages. That means we can get up and running using the latest version...
In my search for a way to allow readers to tweet post that I put on GWB I have come across the TweetMeme plug-in for Windows Live Writer. It automatically puts a twitter button at either the top or bottom of your post depending on how you configure it. It comes with a warning that it does not work with blog servers that strip out script from posts which I made me afraid it was going to make it incompatible with GWB. This turned out to be the case so I figured we would need either an upgrade to the...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last three weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), the Func family of delegates, and the EventHandler family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. This week I will...
The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary. IT interests intentionally live in the past. On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it. Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder...
Today I was looking for a solution to get finally the JScript/Javascript/jQuery Intellisense Featureworking with my ASP.Net Webform Project to work. I found some good articles: - JScript IntelliSense Overview- JScript IntelliSense: A Reference for the “Reference” Tag- Enabling JavaScript intellisense in VS.NET 2010 to work with SharePoint 2010- Rich IntelliSense for jQueryBUT, all of suggested solutions did not work right with my Master Page based Visual Studio 2010 Solution.Only with physical Javascript...
You want the RAD wonderfulness of a visual web part, but it needs to be deployed as a Sandboxed solution. Problem? No, SharePoint powertools for visual studio to the rescue! http://goo.gl/pQ9ct There are a couple limitations, read the above page, nothing major. e.g. 1. Javascript debugging is not supported 2. Debugging asp.net code is not supported. 3. Use of <% Assembly Src= is not supported I understand it does it by adding the markup as an embedded resource, but I haven't actually tried it...
I am a 21 year old Web Developer, with over five years experience in the PHP field. Covering Javascript - jQuery & Ajax, mySQL, JSON and CSS. Out of the five years experience, three have been as a freelancer, the rest commercial work. (I have to say freelance is more comfortable whereas commercial really does get you to do things out of the box.) This blog will cover problems I come across and the solutions I came up with. Bringing ideas into reality - even if it's never been done before! Overall...
I find myself needing to get query parameters that are passed into a web app on the URL quite often. At first I wrote a function that creates an associative array (aka object) with all of the parameters as keys and returns it. But then I was looking at the revealing module pattern, a nice javascript design pattern designed to hide private functions, and came up with a way to do this without even calling a function. What I came up with was this nice little object that automatically initializes itself...
O'Reilly are offering a series of good offers through to Jan 19, 2012. The main page is at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... Already available are: JavaScript path to Mastery set at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... I recommend JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition- PDF is 50% off at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... HTML 5 Programming set at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... Again the PDF's are 50% off. Can't...
These are some of the best RSS feeds I've found for keeping up with HTML5. I'm doing jQuery & MVC development as well so you will find the links have a jQuery/MS angle to them. WhenCanIUse The oh-so-necessary caniuse.com, in RSS update format: http://feeds.feedburner.com... ScriptJunkie http://services.social.micr... good HTML, JavaScript, CSS site hosted by MS Rachel Appel's blog http://rachelappel.com/rss?...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates...
This is the 5th post in the series of HTML5 for ASP.NET Developers Support for HTML5 in Visual Studio 2010 has been quite good with Visual Studio Service Pack 1 However, HTML5 Boilerplate template has been one of the most popular HTML5 templates out in the internet. Now, there is one for your favorite ASP.NET Webforms as well as ASP.NET MVC 3 Projects (even for ASP.NET MVC 2). And its available in the most optimal place, i.e. NuGet. Lets see it in action. Let us fire up Visual Studio 2010 and create...
Goal: Store custom data with the data attribute on any DOM element and retrieve it. Previously under HTML4 we used to use classes to store custom data, something to the affect of <input class="account void limit-5000 over-4999" /> and then have to parse the data out of the class In a book published by Peter-Paul Koch in 2007, ppk on JavaScript, he explains why and how to use custom attributes to make data more accessible to JavaScript, using name-value pairs. Accessing a custom attribute account-limit=5000...
Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for SilverlightShow Top 5 News for November 07 - 13, 2011. Here are the top 5 news on SilverlightShow for last week: Will there be a Silverlight 6 (and does it matter)? Silverlight 5 - the end of the line Microsoft confirms move to align Windows & Windows Phone JavaScript, MVVM and Silverlight - Papa's Perspective How TO: Virtualizing WrapPanel .NET Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light ...
Welcome back, in part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies. In this blog post I’ll get into the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. Tools => Options => Test Tools Have you visited the treasures of Visual...
© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved More Fun with Math The runaway student – three different ways of solving one problem Here is a problem I read in a Russian site: A student is running away. He is moving at 1 mph. Pursuing him are a lion, a tiger and his math teacher. The lion is 40 miles behind and moving at 6 mph. The tiger is 28 miles behind and moving at 4 mph. His math teacher is 30 miles behind and moving at 5 mph. Who will catch him first? Analysis Obviously we have a set of three...
© 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Adventures with JavaScript rendered in IE 8, Chrome 15, and Firefox 8.0 I have written a little monogram about the advantages of Math and wrote a few JavaScript applications to demonstrate them. I was a bit careless and used elements on the page in my JavaScript without using any of the GetElementsByXXXX methods to identify them. Say I had a text box named tbSeqNum into which I entered a number to be used in a computation. In my code I simply referred...
O' Reilly are offering 50% off Javascript e-books at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Back in one of my three original “Little Wonders” Trilogy of posts, I had listed generic delegates as one of the Little Wonders of .NET. Later, someone posted a comment saying said that they would love more detail on the generic delegates and their uses, since...
Today is the big day, the day I attempt to use Ajax in the app… I’ve never done this (well, tell a lie, I’ve done it in a ‘tutorial’ site, but that was a while ago now), so it’s going to be interesting.. OK, basics first, let’s start with the @Ajax.ActionLink Right, first stab: @Ajax.ActionLink("Click to get latest", "LatestEntry", new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId = "ajaxEntrant", InsertionMode = InsertionMode.Replace, HttpMethod = "GET" }) As far as I’m aware, I’m asking to get the ‘LatestEntry’...
The problem: Images and other static files will not be cached unless you tell it to. In IIS7 it is remarkably easy to do this. Web pages are becoming increasingly complex with more scripts, style sheets, images, and Flash on them. A first-time visit to a page may require several HTTP requests to load all the components. By using Expires headers these components become cacheable, which avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often associated with images,...
Yes, I was. Recently, I’ve taken a good hard look at JavaScript. I’ve used it before but mostly in the capacity of web design. Using JQuery to make your web page do cool stuff is different than really creating a JavaScript application using all of the language constructs. What I’m finding as I use it more is that I may have been wrong about my assumptions about it. Let me explain. I enjoyed doing cool stuff with JQuery but the limited experience with JavaScript as a language coupled with the bad...
In this Issue: Colin Eberhardt, WindowsPhoneGeek, John Papa, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Sumit Dutta, Asim Sajjad, Dhananjay Kumar, Charles Petzold, Peter Kuhn, and Ollie Riches. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Display Total Records After Applying PagedCollectionView Filter" Asim Sajjad WP7: "Announcing: Phone as a Remote Control" Peter Kuhn Metro/WinRT: "Asynchronous Processing in Windows 8" Charles Petzold Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's...
In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Mark Monster, Antoni Dol, Chaitanya Venneti, Erik Arthur and Jeffrey Ferman, David Kelley, Jose Fajardo(-2-), Andy Beaulieu, Rudi Grobler, Chad Campbell, and Andrej Tozon. Above the Fold: VS2011: "Visual Studio XAML Designer: New Grid Features" WP7: "Statistics for your Windows Phone application (Google Analytics)" Mark Monster Metro/WinRT/Windows8: "Physics Games: Multi-targeting Windows 8 + Windows Phone 7" Andy Beaulieu Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Back in one of my three original “Little Wonders” Trilogy of posts, I had listed generic delegates as one of the Little Wonders of .NET. Later, someone posted a comment saying said that they would love more detail on the generic delegates and their uses, since...
I don’t usually do a product profile unless I either really like the product and use it myself, or I’m genuinely curious about the product and what it can do for me. While I haven’t used InRule before, it does fit the latter of those criteria because of my interest in similar products I have used in the past. A Quick Intro to my Life in Rules… Flash back to my college years (when 5.25” floppies were king) and you’d see a young guy in an Artificial Intelligence class learning about a Knowledge Based...
Last week I pushed a new application up to production, and started hearing complaints of a memory leak. After running some diagnostics I learned two exciting things: http://bugs.jqueryui.com/ti... The current version of jQuery UI (1.18.16) has a memory leak with the DatePicker control - including the DatePicker control as part of the jQuery UI is all it takes to cause memory to be allocated and never returned until the browser is closed. Every refresh of the page, or every time a new page is...
No new post this week, as it's been a very, extrordinarily busy week! Among other things this week, I've been tied down with: Release 1 of our new Agile project at work is in full swing. Gave my "C#/.NET Little Wonders" presentation to the St. Louis .NET User group (www.stlnet.org), which can be found here. Writing a small review of a rules-based expert system. And getting married in a small courthouse ceremony this last Wednesday night. So sorry for the delay in my next post, but thanks for the...
I recently picked up a wireless network camera to use around the house. After getting it up and running, I realized that the “mobile” support was less than ideal. The camera’s on-board web server provided a still image, an ActiveX control or a Java Applet as viewing options and only the still image was usable on my iPhone. I decided to try a webpage which would refresh automatically every 1 second in order to get a crude motion video effect via the HTML meta tag, as shown below. <meta http-equiv="Refresh"...
Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Previously, I had created some posts about the Task Parallel Library’s Concurrent Collections – which are very efficient collections designed for concurrent use with minimal contention – but in this next series of Little Wonders posts, I’d like to explore the parts...
I've been working on an HTML5 application called Virtual Hamronograph. Since JavaScript can't save to the local file system I use localStorage to allow users to save harmonographs. I find this to be a good alternative. If you don't know, localStorage is a new global object in HTML5 that allows you to save up to 5MB of data in the browser. You save values by calling localStorage.setItem(key, value). You get values by calling localStorage.getItem(key). You can remove items by calling localStorage.removeItem(key)....