For full disclosure, Packt Publishing sent me a review copy of this book. They did not ask for a positive review, just a review.
This is the first book by Jorge Ramon that I’ve read. This book is exactly what the title says that it is, a Cookbook. It’s got 109 solutions to problems solved by Ext JS 3.0. I was expecting, like a lot of other books to get a fill of all of the philosophy behind what they are trying to promote but that wasn’t the case. This book just in with no nonsense and gets right to the code.
More on my blog at Review of Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook
I’ve come to realize that many web designers don’t understand what “Above the Fold” and how it really should be used. Above the Fold is an old print newspaper layout term for what’s on the top part of the page, the part that is displayed in the window at the newspaper stand. In web design, the term is used for the bits that the user can see without having to scroll
Read all about it on my blog at - Above the Fold and how It Really Should be Used
Building on the success of the DreamSpark and BizSpark program that we launched about 11 months ago Microsoft is now launching the WebsiteSpark program.
WebsiteSpark is designed for small web consultancies ranging in size from 1 to 10 people. With WebsiteSpark, you get a package of software specifically selected for a web consultancy to serve their customers better.
For a lot more details, read my full blog post at Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program.
I’m going to be speaking at
RIAPalooza in about two weeks, well more specifically at the time of this writing it’s 10 days, 12 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds. :)
I’m going to be tag teaming with Mike Labriola again talking about “10 questions about RIA you haven’t had the courage to ask”. We’ve got a short list of questions but are hoping to get some questions from the crowd as well. If you happen to have any questions, feel free to shoot them to me in the comments section on this post.
Anyways, we were discussing different ways to get the word out about RIAPalooza and someone mentioned that we didn’t have have a blog badge so I decided to create one in Silverlight. In this post, I explain how I built the blog badge and share the code. Full details on my blog at Creating a Simple Silverlight Countdown Blog badge
I’m in conversation with a group that’s using Ext JS for their RIA. As I haven’t used it, I thought I’d go ask at the international water fountain that is twitter about it.
Anyone using Ext JS? Thoughts compared to jQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous?about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck
Read the responses I got back from a number of industry leader and JavaScript experts at Antidotal info on JavaScript Library Ext JS
On the heels of the announcement by Michael Eaton, I thought I should post about how excited I am about the upcoming Kalamazoo X Conference…
The Kalamazoo X conference, while being put on by the technical community, is a very different sort of conference. You’re not going to hear “technical” talks. All of talks pertain to technical folk but it’s a step back from the nuts and bolts that we usually deal with day in and day out and focusing on the topics that are really important.
There’s an amazing line up of speakers and content. I blogged about a lot of these speakers on my blog at Kalamazoo X conference.
Like so many thing that we do in our daily development, there’s a high probability that someone has already solved the problem if you know where to look. This is just a collection of resources that I’ve found useful over time. Honestly, I’m posting these here because I need them in one place so that I can find them easily…
Read about all of these resources on my blog at Interesting Web Development Related Resources
I ran across this article on ZDNet (Wanted: ROI for internal app development) that really worried me. My friends at PreEmptive Solutions ran a survey across a wide number of developers that included people from 21 different industry segments in 33 countries asking about how the company measure the ROI of an application that they are building. The terrifying part is that the survey found that 58% of companies don't bother measuring ROI on their internal applications and the majority of the ones that do measure don't do so in a consistent and proven way.
For the full article – see my blog post at Measuring ROI – Moving from Cost Center To Strategic Partner
![image_thumb[31]](http://geekswithblogs.net/images/geekswithblogs_net/joshholmes/WindowsLiveWriter/ThreeEssentialExpressionBlendAddins_8779/image_thumb%5B31%5D_de5129fc-4c02-4ef4-b573-4f20a5523719.png "image_thumb[31]")
Expression Blend, believe or not, has an add-in model. It’s highly unsupported but it exists. The unsupported nature of it means that you have to do a little Red Green style patching to get them to run in the first place and if they cause instability, don’t call Microsoft support. However, there are a couple of really cool ones that are out there.
To read all about these add-ins and how to get them running in Blend regardless of where you launch it from – check out my post at Three Essential Expression Blend Add-ins
I’m going to be polar plunging to raise money for the Special Olympics Michigan this coming weekend in Belleville.
This is a charity that is special to me because of my youngest daughter, Maura, who has a lot of challenges of her own. One day, my hope is to see her compete in the Special Olympics.
To find out how you can help – check out my post at Polar Plunging for the Special Olympics
I’m at an internal conference at Microsoft this week and one of the sessions that I attended was called Practical Design tips and tricks for Developers. It was a set of hands on labs that were created out of the Expression team. It was really slick and I learned a whole lot of new techniques and am feeling a whole lot more confident in my Expression Blend abilities. The really slick part is that you get to work through those same labs if you are interested because they have been posted on Arturo’s blog.
For more details check out my post at UI Design for Developers Series, by Total Training.
In my last post, we put together a quick and simple photo gallery. This post will be building on that.
Depending on the size of your photo, however, it didn't have the worlds greatest user experience. I'll be playing with the CSS, JavaScript and a ton more over time. Today, however, I'm going to be just returning a thumbnail rather than the full picture to show in the view.
I don't want to have to physically create each of the thumbnails so we'll generate those dynamically on the fly.
Read the full post to find out how to dynamically generate thumbnails, create a custom ActionResult and leverage that all in an MVC view.
Full post on my blog at Returning Thumbnails With the MVC Framework