My Blog

I try to keep this blog relatively technology focused but sometimes something happens in my life that requires an announcement. I am also mentioning it here because I think it makes a good story:

I just got back from SDP13 in Israel and spent 10 days in that lovely country. With this trip planned, I thought it a perfect time to ask my girlfriend to marry me. I'm 44 and I've never been married so it's about time, right? Unfortunately we had a minor argument and in my haste I texted "Maybe I'm not getting married…" This text was meant for a friend of mine who I'd been confiding in about the whole diamond buying experience.  But this text went to my lovely girlfriend instead. Foiled by technology again. So the cat was out of the bag and I didn't think I could surprise her with the ring in Israel.

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If you build PhoneGap apps and test with the browser, moving to phones sometimes causes a boatload of problems. Because there isn't a great debugging story, being able to see the console window would be of great help.

My particular problem was that my JavaScript and CSS links weren't cased correctly. And it seems that the Android implementation is case sensitive (like most Linux implementations) but I couldn't even see what was wrong. Unfortunately the PhoneGap Build tools let's you use the console and interrogate the DOM but console log messages are lost. So I simply dropped down to the Android SDK.

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After my recent talk on Mobile-First Design, one of the attendees tweeted that he thought it was ironic that my talk was on responsive design but my blog wasn't mobile-friendly. I told him that my company site was…but that was a cop-out. I hadn't had time to get the blog setup with a good template. So voila! I haven't confirmed that everything works the way I want but we should be close!

As some of you might not know, I don't use a blog engine (it's just a custom ASP.NET MVC site). What I love about ASP.NET MVC, is that since the markup so fairly separated from the code (I try and use as little actual Razor markup as possible), skinning it with a new Bootstrap template was pretty simple. It took me about 8 hours to convert it all.

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I had a great time at yesterday's online DotNetConf. I think my "Mobile-First Responsive Web Design" talk went pretty well. You can see the talk on YouTube (embedded below). The talk was focused on designing websites to be efficient on mobile platforms by starting with your design on a mobile and scaling up to tablets and desktops.

If you viewed my talk, you might be interested in the slides and source code. You can get them here:

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If you're interested in cross-platform mobile apps, I like the solution that PhoneGap has. It uses HTML5/CSS/JS as the UI stack and I find it compelling to build apps for iOS, Android, Kindle, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store. I've just released a new course on PhoneGap that attempts to fill in some of the holes in building apps.  The course includes:

Hope you enjoy the course. You can view it here:

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I've created a new example of a PhoneGap app for my talk at the Atlanta Windows Apps meeting. The talk I did tonight didn't go all that well, but I got it working and the result is something you can download and see how to use a minimum of WinJS to build your Windows 8 apps.

The example PhoneGap app sourcecode can be found on GitHub:

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My PhoneGap series will continue soon. I promise. I’ve been busy working on a new business: How to Watch. This new business aims to help people find where a movie or TV show is available via online streaming (e.g. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant or iTunes). I got sick of having to search on each of the platforms to find "my stories". The result is this site and mobile apps (Android, Windows 8, Windows Phone and Kindle; iOS is coming soon if I can get Apple to certify the thing!).

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One of the things that I’ve been spending a lot of time working with lately is the ability to be able to build cross-platform apps. While I spend a lot of time in the Microsoft space (especially Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8), I need to be able to create and deploy apps to iOS and Android platforms. I've decided to do a series on building one of these using Single Page Application for the web, then deploying it to devices via PhoneGap:

There are a number of solutions for cross platform apps (e.g. MonoTouch/Droid, et al.)  The types of apps I am building are just consuming or displaying information from a standard web back-end (e.g. REST services).  Because I typically need to build a responsive website for the solution as well, using a solution that could share some or all of it’s code with the website is a good match.

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Very short post today, but wanted to share something that happens more than I'd like to admit. I work for some clients who use TFS and when I can't in through their VPN I need to zip up my files for them to check-in manually. It's not fun (I miss being able to create a change set in Mercurial or Git). When this happens I need to have a quick way of copying all the files in a project that aren't marked as read-only. Robocopy to the rescue:

This allows me to copy all the files I'm working on while skipping the temp files (e.g. obj, bin), package chagnes, backup files and upgrade files. Hope this helps anyone else that runs into this.

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With the surprising news of Sinofsky's leaving Microsoft still fluttering in the winds, I knew I'd hear some rants about Silverlight be heard among the XAML-lovers out there. I decided I needed a blog post (albeit a short one) to say my peace.

I've heard many say that Sinofsky is responsible for the death of Silverlight and that it's absence on Windows 8 is a shame. I hear a lot of Silverlight enthusiasts (or apologists) that Silverlight, while being a great technology, was killed because DevDiv and Windows couldn't get along. At last year's build, it was big news that Sinofsky actually said the word Silverlight made news. While the idea that Silverlight ran on a Mac certainly caused waves in the Windows team, it's not the reason for it getting pushed to the pile of technologies that are now in 'sustaining engineering' mode. If any executive is responsible for the current state of Silverlight it's one who is no longer with us...and not even part of Microsoft: Steve Jobs.

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