The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Visual Studio and WebStorm: Am I Mad?
I might be. In many of the projects I help with we have to handle back-end and front-end coding for web projects. This means I need the best in breed in tools no matter where I’m writing code.
In many cases this is Visual Studio. I love this tool and have for years. While it’s not without it’s own foibles, it does most things really well. But not everything.
Web development in Visual Studio used to be pretty painful. The JavaScript, CSS and HTML support was substandard. Since the introduction of Visual Studio 2012 as well as Web Essentials things have gotten really good. If you’re not using Web Essentials yet, go get it now! It includes great support for a variety of things that help with your day to day development including:
Great Time in Germany
This week, I’m in Köln, Germany for two short events. This is one of my favorite cities and I spent time here back in the early ‘90s as a street musician. I didn’t need an excuse to visit this great city, but I had one anyway.
First was the Web Developers Kompact where I showed off AngularJS in an hour. The next day I did walkthrough of ASP.NET Web API at the .NET Developers Kompact. The attendees were great and even though there were fewer questions than I normally get, the quality of the questions was great.
Thanks to everyone involved for helping put these events on and inviting me and my wife to your wonderful city.
Goodbye Netflix API (And HowToWat.ch Too)
Today is the day that Netflix has decided to shut down their public API. They stopped giving out API keys a long time ago, but except for a select few apps, all others are dead…including mine.
As I shut it down today I have no regrets. I actually am surprised by how long it has lasted because the road was rocky and I learned a lot.
When I built the app, I was trying to build a service that I wanted. Unfortunately without Netflix, I don’t think the service is worth keeping alive. The reality is that I really believe that every success is built up other perceived failures. The net result of HowToWat.ch is a lot of learning that has served me well and I am sure will serve me well in my next idea (whatever it is).
What's New in WebStorm 9 Webinar
Recently Pluralsight has been doing a series of Webinars on a variety of subjects. This week I’ll be doing one in their Dev series. Join me this Tuesday when I’ll be talking about the new features in WebStorm 9 and demonstrating it.
These webinars are an hour long and give us plenty of time to do questions and answers about anything you want to know about the topic! Hope to see as many of you there as possible.
Advanced Technology Days 10 - My Talks
I had the pleasure of being invited to come to Zagreb, Croatia for the Advanced Technology Days! Though my Croatian is pretty dusty (by that I mean completely missing), I got to talk to a lot of great devs and have a wonderful lunch!
I love events like this as it gives me the chance to talk about technologies that benefit from showing live coding (versus just slide ware). I did two talks, one on AngularJS and another on Node.js for .NET Developers. Below you can find the slides and the demos:
Angular 1.3 and Breaking Change for Controllers
If you are upgrading your projects to AngularJS 1.3 and you’re noticing a problem, there is a breaking change that might affect you. The error usually presents itself as “Controller error Argument is not a function”. If you’re seeing this, this post should help.
Unfortunately, my Pluralsight “Building a Site with Bootstrap, AngularJS, ASP.NET, EF and Azure” course repeats this problem (since it was built with a much earlier version of AngularJS. I am going to be rebuilding this course soon with updated versions of everything (Boostrap 4, AngularJS 1.3, ASP.NET vNext, EF7) but until then, you’ll want to see the fix.
It all comes down to how you create controllers. Luckily the fix is the way you should be writing your controllers (though you can opt into the old behavior). When I’ve taught AngularJS in the past, I’ve created controllers using global functions as that makes the story simple. Usually when I’ve taught it before, I’m trying to help people understand the concepts, not the best practices. Starting with AngularJS 1.3, this isn’t the default behavior.
My New Course: WebStorm Fundamentals
Last week my seventeenth course for Pluralsight! I love building content for Pluralsight and it allows me to teach technologies that I am utilizing in my own life. This new course is no different.
The new course is all about using WebStorm 9 to build web applications. The course was built using the WebStorm 9 EAP so I was able to cover new features as well as the basics.
The course is taught over six modules covering everything from basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but also delving into more advanced features of the IDE. The topics covered include:
It Is Too Soon to Panic on AngularJS 2.0
So AngularJS team finally is talking more publically about what they’re trying to do. At the ngEurope conference last week, they talked very opening about their new strategy for AngularJS 2.0 and it has a lot of people freaked out. Sounds a lot like some reaction to Silverlight in fact.
I’m seeing a flood of hate on the AngularJS team at the moment. I am not sure it is justified. Here’s why:
While there are a lot of details about what they’re thinking being shown and shared, the reality is that AngularJS 2.0 comes out in 13 months. A huge amount of time in web development. I am sure they are hearing all the concern and fear and are taking it into account. I suspect it will be fine.
Hello World Podcast Changes
Last November when I decided to start the Hello World Podcast, I wasn’t sure how long I could sustain it. I’m having fun doing the show and getting to speak to the most amazing people in our field. I’m most surprised by the different stories.
Because I started with a computer as a kid and then just fell into software, I thought I’d get that story over and over again. But that’s not been the case for the most part. I’ve heard from people who were in medical school, fighter pilots, retail management, and even people who thought they hated writing software. It’s been an amazing year.
How I Answer Course Questions
I am delighted to be creating courses for Pluralsight. It’s fun and it’s something I can do while I am travelling on the http://wilderworldtour.com. I hope the students are getting a lot out of the courses and am happy to answer questions when they get stuck.
But it seems that many of the questions end up as messages directly here on my blog or even directly to my email address. The only problem with this is that if I answer questions directly, the other students can’t benefit from them.
This is why I invariably reply asking them to ask on the discussion tab. I point this out because it seems that some students missed this part of the course page entirely: