The Reports of the Death of JavaScript are Greatly Exaggerated
Not John BoltonThe notorious quip by Mark Twain came to mind today as I was reviewing comments to my recent blog post about Blazor, a lot of the comments talked about WebAssembly being the death of JavaScript.
The fact is that we've all been here before. In fact, we've been here many times. And I, for one, don't want to simply see WebAssembly as something to replace JavaScript. Here are my thoughts.
Who is Blazor for Exactly?
In case you haven't been following the news about WebAssembly (e.g. WASM), it's a new way to build something akin to bytecode for the browser. The latest versions of most browsers now support it including Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Microsoft has built an experimental release of something called Blazor that builds web projects in WebAssembly so you can write all your code in C#. But after playing with one of the builds, I'm starting to think about who this really is for. Let's delve into what WebAssembly is and then how Blazor works to explain what I think.
Kansas City Developers Conference
So KCDC is over for another year. This was my first year at the event and the organizers made me so welcome. Highly recommended!
I had the opportunity to teach both VueJS and Visual Studio Code for the attendees. As promised, here is the code and the slides from the event!
Why I Moved to Vue.js from Angular 2
I know I’m going to upset some people, but hang in and read the whole article…really. In updating my blog recently, one of the changes I wanted to make was to update my use of the JavaScript framework I used for the contact page.
When I built this blog, I wanted to get comfortable with Angular 2. I shoehorned Angular 2 into the contact page as an excuse to use it. Never a good decision.
How'd You Build That Map?
When I started the Wilder World Tour, I built a simple map so my Mom could know where I was during the trip. I thought others might be interested too.
I’d been meaning to find an extra day or two to wrap this all in a little wrapper and share it. I finally found time the last couple of days. The result is travelMap, a library that allows you to build your own travel maps including showing current location, lines between locations, and popup information about each stop.
AngularJS and VS Code in Singapore
I’m currently in southeast Asia for my world tour. While in Singapore, I had the pleasure to chat with a great group of developers about AngularJS.
I love when I get great questions and the developers at this event were really keyed into the web stack and asked the hard questions about AngularJS (and of course AngularJS 2.0).
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.
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.
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:
New Course: Front-end Web Dev Quick Start
It’s that time again. I’ve recently released a new course on Pluralsight. This time I tackle Web Development for complete beginners.
If you are a developer who wants to move from either back-end development or from desktop development to client-side web development, this course may be for you. The concept around the course is to get you up to speed with the very basics of web development in a short amount of time. In fact, in just over three hours, you should be able to get a basic understanding of web development.
It Is Time to Learn JavaScript
JavaScript is having a great year. With the continuation of web development, Node.js, and even Apple adding JavaScript as a replacement for their AppleScript.
You may be waiting until you have to learn JavaScript, but maybe you should learn JavaScript to make you a better developer. Let me pitch it to you:
Choose Your Own Adventure with Node.js View Engines
As some of you know, I’ve been delving into Node.js for a new Pluralsight course that is coming out soon. One of the interesting aspects to me is the idea of server-side view engines. As an ASP.NET (and ASP before that) guy, I’ve been using server-side view engines for a long time…not that we always called them that.
Most Node.js templates out there (including the Express.js application template that ships with the Node.js Tools for Visual Studio) includes the Jade View Engine.
Node.js and Visual Studio? Sure!
I’ve been working on a new course for Pluralsight on “Node.js for .NET Developers”. It’s been a fun course to write and one of the aspects of the course that I find interesting is that the open source Node.js Tools for Visual Studio plugin actually works really well.
What I particular like is that it doesn’t change the way you use Node.js – it can live side-by-side with command-line tooling like NPM, Bower, or even node.exe. It doesn’t try to do more than it should.
Why is DOM-Centric JavaScript Hard to Test?
While producing my recent course on Large Scale JavaScript, I was digging into the testability of JavaScript. So much of the JavaScript I see out there continues to be jQuery driven, DOM-centric JavaScript.
Sure, many of my readers are moving towards AngularJS, Ember and other client-side libraries that encourage modularization, testability, and separation of concerns, but not all web developers are. Ultimately we need to test our JavaScript no matter what the nature of it is.
Why Should You Care About NodeJS?
I know that many of my readers are .NET guys and a core constituency actively hate JavaScript so bear with me and let’s talk about NodeJS for a minute.
Just to be clear, I am not advocating anything by this post. What I think is important is that as you mature as a developer that you look at whatever is happening in the community and be open to why something is new and what new ideas are being proffered by the new technology. My hope is that this post will show some of that.
Bootstrap 3 Grid System Explained
Are you starting to work with Bootstrap 3? If so, maybe I can help. I’ve recently released a Bootstrap 3 course on Pluralsight that covers many of the new features including how to migrate from Bootstrap 2 to 3.
Here is an excerpt from the course where I explain how the new grid system works in Bootstrap 3:
JavaScript Function Scopes
As some of you know, I authored a Pluralsight course on JavaScript for C# Developers. We’ve released an excerpt from that course covering how JavaScript function scopes work.
If you’re just getting started learning JavaScript, it can be easy to bring your C# biases to the language since they both have curly braces. Hopefully this excerpt will help:
Getting Ready for AngularJS 1.2
AngularJS is going through their release cycle now and that means that AngularJS 1.2 is going to be released soon with some specific changes that you'll need to address. I'll be updating my Pluralsight Course with the 1.2 changes as soon as the new version ships.
The biggest change for most people is the routing support is now packaged separately. To use routing you'll need to do two things:
Need LINQ but Writing JavaScript?
One of the tasks that I found cumbersome when writing JavaScript is simple collection manipulation. I have gotten spoiled in C# with LINQ. Sorting, filtering, shaping and more is easy with LINQ but what about in JavaScript? Underscore.js to the rescue.
Underscore.js is a small utility library that can help in collection manipulation (as well as other great features). I first started using Underscore.js to replace jQuery's (and AngularJS's) for-each implementations. I find underscore's simple and quick. Like much of JavaScript, the magic is happening in a callback function (think Lambda):
My New Web Development Course is Live
Are you getting ready to build a new website? Are you interested in shortening your development by using Bootstrap, AngularJS, Azure and ASP.NET? If so, my new course might be just for you.
In this new course I build a new web site from scratch. I start out with a Bootstrap template (since my design skills suck) and move through creating content, building a database, exposing a REST-ful API and building a Single Page Application. I wrap it up by publishing the site to Azure Web Sites showing you how to not only get your application up an running in the cloud, but also how to monitor it and handle standard tasks like using your own domain in Azure.
My AngularJS Talk at Atlanta .NET UG
Thanks to all who showed up to see me talk about AngularJS at the recent Atlanta .NET User's Group. At the talk, I wrote the client-side code for an AngularJS app by hand. The slides are pretty thin, but the code includes all the functionality I showed. I promised the slides and code so here they are!
If you have questions about any of this, feel free to comment and I'll help as much as I can!
JavaScript Promises
No I am not talking the promise that JavaScript will fix everything if you use it. I don't even believe that ;) I am talking about the concept of a promise object that several JavaScript libraries use (including AngularJS, jQuery, Dojo and WinJS).
A promise is a pattern for handling asynchronous operations. The problem is that essentially when you start an asynchronous operation, you need to execute some code as the operation is completed. Asynchronous code is so common that most libraries have found a solution for passing in callbacks. But there is little commonality to how each libraries does this. Let's take jQuery as an example:
Building Atlanta Code Camp Website
I recently helped the Atlanta Code Camp effort by building them a new website. You can see it here: Atlanta Code Camp. I am pretty proud of what I was able to accomplish in the scant number of hours I had to build it. It's not done as we need to improve it when we have the speakers chosen and set up the schedule, but so far I am pretty happy with it.
I had a number of goals for the project:
Debugging PhoneGap with the Android Console
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.
My Practical PhoneGap Course is now Live!
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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