The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
TypeScript (or the obligatory post about it)
Like many of you, I've been itching to see what Anders had up his sleeve and I wasn't disappointed yesterday when they announced TypeScript. After teaching all day, I took a quick look at TypeScript (and I do mean quick).
There was a lot of buzz yesterday and the response seemed to be in one of two camps (for the most part):
I think I am in the middle of this. TypeScript reminds me a lot of LESS. What I mean by that is that I think the smart thing they did was make all JavaScript valid TypeScript. In case that isn't clear, TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. This means that they're adding some features to JavaScript to help with large, enterprise sized codebases including:
ASP.NET MVP
Today I was renewed as an MVP for the tenth time and could not be happier. Over the past year I've been looking last XAML into the web stack and Microsoft has graciously moved me from a Data MVP over to an ASP.NET MVP. This doesn't mean I won't be sharing on Silverlight, WPF or data technologies; it's just a reflection of what I am working with now.
I want to thank everyone in the community for following me and reading my blog over past year...you're the reason I've been renewed again and I sincerely appreciate it!
When to Not Use Observable in KnockoutJS
I've been really busy lately and my list of things to blog on has been getting backed up. One thing that occurred to me while building my new JavaScript course was about how KnockoutJS and Observables actually work. Here's the deal.
KnockoutJS supports the idea of an observable object. This is similar to WPF/XAML concept of INotifyPropertyChanged interface. Most KnockoutJS dev's I've talked with use KnockoutJS's observable everywhere. But there are cases when you don't need it.
The biggest problem I see is that some people think that to get two-way binding you need observable. For example, here is a JSFiddle with a typical (but simple) KnockoutJS example:
Eleven Years Ago
On the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I am reflective of a difficult time for my country, the world and my own life. I had recently been laid off for the first time in my career...so when the attacks happened, I had all the time in the world to watch all the coverage I could. I was in Portland (Oregon) so I was not close, but it felt close. Watching this news happen in real-time was profound event for me. If I was closer, I hope that I would have jumped in to help. My heart sank for the victims and their families. I tried to make sense of this violent act...and it was simply senseless. At that Twin Towers; at the Pentagon and in that tragic field in Pennsylvania - the bravery and heroism that I have to believe I am not capable of.
I kept thinking of this quote that had touched me as a teenager:
Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow. - Dan Rather
My New Course: JavaScript for C# Devs
If you are a C# developer who is ready to take on JavaScript, I have the course for you. The goal of the new course is to help C# developers understand the nature of JavaScript so you can write JavaScript like a native speaker. This is for developers who need JavaScript for any of the popular places to use JavaScript including:
The course aims to map C# features directly to JavaScript features so you can understand many key topics including:
This course is not platform focused but language focused so no matter where you're going to use JavaScript, I hope this course can help you ramp up quickly to the language! See it here:
LESS at DevLink
Just finished my talk at DevLink on "A Better CSS: LESS is More…". It was a good crowd and I was surprised that so many people had already heard of LESS which is awesome. Hopefully I covered the breadth of the language. It was a fun crowd and it's been a fun conference. If you haven't had a chance to get to Chattanooga and see the fresh water aquarium, it shouldn't be missed!
I promised the crowd that I would share the slides and the code. You can go both here:
If you had any questions about the talk that you didn't get a chance to ask me, feel free to drop me a comment below and I'll try to answer it.
Great Time at Gwinnett .NET Users Group
I headed up to the Gwinnett .NET Users Group last night had we talked all about mobile web development using ASP.NET! If you were there, thanks for attending and here are the slides and code as promised!
If you had any questions that you didn’t get to ask at the talk, just comment below.
aspConf was fun!
I had a good time doing a couple of talks today. If you joined me online, thanks for coming. For those who missed my talks, they will be posting the videos on Channel 9. As promised you can get the slides and examples here for my talks:
I hope you enjoyed the talks!
New Era for Microsoft?
A lot of people are writing about the possibility of a new era at Microsoft. As a cynical fanboy I am hoping that this turns out to be true. I think there are a lot of great things coming out of Redmond these days and they deserve credit for making real change.
If you’re not keeping up, let’s talk about some of the comments that are being talked about. First up, Woz:
Woz liking what is coming out with the Surface penlet (pen tablet) is very interesting. He’s already on record liking the Windows Phone quite a bit. I think he may be on to something.
Windows Phone 8 - What do I think?
So the Windows Phone event is over and I’ve had time to digest it somewhat and read between the lines. At the time (for those who read my twitter feed), I was quite reactionary and upset at much of the news. Most of this what as a user of a Windows Phone, not as a developer of a Windows Phone. Do note that another caveat is that I am an author of a Windows Phone 7.5 book, and the thought of my book being suddenly obsolete was upsetting as well (but that happens every time one of my books passes the new car smell line). So let me talk briefly about what I think about the news from both a user and a developer on the Windows Phone platform.
The big news for most users is the fact that Windows Phone 8 won’t work on current hardware. To me this is short-sighted as it seems to punish the only fans the platform has so far. This was especially relevant since I *just* received my Nokia 900 (after having a HTC HD7 for the last 15 months). The idea that this new piece of hardware was going to be out of date in only 4-6 months upset me. But let’s think about it in broader strokes that just me. Is this a good strategy overall?
Windows Phone 7.x has a small market share right now. That’s a fact that no one who cares about the phone likes to think about. So the number of users who will be affected by the easier path of not building support for older phones is still small. When I look at the Android ecosystem of users, the core geeks care about 2.2/2.3/ICS but most day-to-day users don’t. They care about features but they don’t seem to even know what version they have. That doesn’t make the decision a nice one, but it’s one that I think the phone can stomach…especially if Windows Phone 8 can actually penetrate the two behemoths of iPhone/Android market share. I don’t like it, but I understand it.