An alternative to CAPTCHA
I was visiting MediaMonkey's Forums (note, a great tool for organizing your music) and when I posted a message to the forum they showed this great anti-spam device:
In a Perfect World? Build Conference Wishes
I am headed to Build Windows next week and I have a lot of hopes for the conference. I haven’t been to a conference as an attendee alone in quite a long time. I am anxious to see what the v.Next is out of Redmond.
I didn’t get to go to the 2000 PDC that changed everything…so I really wanted to be here for this conference. Is this going to change everything again? I have no earthly idea but I hope for a mix of new and old.
Time Zones and Servers
I am getting married and that means I get a bunch of development tasks to do for the wedding planning. I guess it’s my own fault, I did propose with an app.
One of the tasks I had to do was create a new page on my wedding site for the day of the wedding to include things like directions and parking. Pretty simple HTML stuff, but one thing I wanted to be sure of was to only show the page on the day of the wedding. This should be easy, but the time zone of the server has kicked my ass before.
My Switch to Azure Websites
I am a developer first. I’ve become my family’s IT department but not by choice. This is the fate of most developers I know.
For the past year or so I’ve been experimenting with Azure Websites as a solution for quick, one-off sites and even for class examples. I’m a big fan. Let me tell you why.
A Bunch of Devs Presentation
I recently had the pleasure of talking to the “A Bunch of Devs” user group in Atlanta about Web API. I had never spoken at this group and I had a great time.
They had really great questions all around. If you have a chance to visit the user group, it is really worth your time. Of course, free pizza is never a bad thing.
New to Web API? Don't Rush to Implementation
I’ve been getting good feedback on my Web API course on Pluralsight but some of the comments have concerned me. Lots of the students (from my small sample size) seem to be trying to infer how to *design* an API, not just implement one. That course is specifically about how to implement an API.
What’s important as far as I am concerned is to well design the API (regardless of which way you implement the API). So if you’re starting to use Web API and you need an API for your app, for your customers, or for others to consume (e.g. 3rd party developers) – stop figuring out how to implement the API and go back and design the API.
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.
Client-side Package Manager: How I Love Bower
Depending on your environment, you’re probably already using some package manager for your server-side code. Gems for Ruby, Nuget for .NET, NPM for Node…whatever. In any of these cases you’re used to being able to get the piece of code you need and the other requirements. For the web this is more difficult…or used to be.
For web projects, we’ve needed a way to get these client-side scripts. Sure Nuget or other package manager *can* do this but it’s been a round peg in a square hole. That’s where Bower comes in.
Single Page Applications? Bah Humbug!
I know that the title of this post may be a bit of link bait, sorry about that. But having been in this business quite a while now, I am noticing a trend. A trend that worries me.
The Single Page Application (or SPA) moniker is one I’ve always disliked (as you’d know if you follow me on Twitter). But it’s not the technology I have a problem with, it’s the moniker and the implications of the moniker.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 4 - MVC 6
I had planned on finishing these a long time ago, but working on my Pluralsight course about ASP.NET 5 distracted me. Sorry about that.
If you’ve been doing web development in .NET, you probably have at least a passing experience with ASP.NET’s MVC framework. At it’s core, it’s a common way to build and architect web applications. The new stack is built on the same metaphors from the older versions. If you’ve been using MVC before, you won’t be lost and some of the additions are welcome.
The Week at DEVIntersection
I want to thank all the great attendees I met at this week’s DEVIntersection (Fall 2015) conference in Vegas! Richard Campbell and company put on a great show!
I had the opportunity to do three talks and two of them went well (if you were at my Bootstrap talk, you know what I’m talking about). In any case, I wanted to share the slide and code with the attendees so here it is:
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:
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.
ASP.NET 5: First Impressions
I’ve been working on a new web site wholly using the ASP.NET 5 (e.g. vNext, MVC6, etc.) for the past couple of weeks. This means using Visual Studio 2015 Preview and the new project types in ASP.NET 5.
The idea around the site is to be an example of an ASP.NET 5 site using MVC6, EF7, and Visual Studio 2015. It’s not perfect and ASP.NET 5 isn’t ready yet so I expect to continue to fix and remove hacks for quite a while, but it’s been fun to dig into a whole new stack while it’s still getting the kinks worked out. Here are some of my first impressions.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 1 - Getting Started
Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with the new ASP.NET 5 (also known as ASP.NET vNext) bits using Visual Studio 2015. I’m trying to make sense of the new changes and how they will affect how I build websites. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned about the new stack.
I’m going to do this by talking through an example website I wrote using the new bits. Do know that we’re still pretty early and Visual Studio 2015 (CTP6 as of this writing) and ASP.NET 5 Beta 3 are both in a state of flux. This is definitely about what’s coming, not what is here so far.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 2 - Startup
In this second post in my six-part series on ASP.NET 5, we’ll take a look at how your ASP.NET 5 applications will be configured upon startup. The startup in this new version of ASP.NET 5 is very different, but hopefully is clearer and easier to debug. At least that’s my impression so far.
If you haven’t read the prior topics, it would probably be helpful to start with the earlier articles. You can see a list of the links to the articles below:
Fun Talk Today in Delhi
I’m on the World Tour and this stop is in Delhi, India! While here I had the fun opportunity to give a talk on AngularJS to a great group at Sapient in Delhi, India.
Via Pluralsight and the great Pinal Dave helped organize this event. If I go long enough without giving a talk, I start to get the shakes. The group had great questions which I always like.
A Look at ASP.NET 5: Part 3 - EF7
NOTE: This post has been updated for changes in Beta 7 and later.
Every web project needs some sort of data framework and ASP.NET 5 is no exception. Like it’s forbearers, ASP.NET 5 uses Entity Framework, but this version of the Entity Framework is different. It’s being re-engineered from the ground up just like the ASP.NET 5 stack.
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.
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:
New Pluralsight Course on Debugging Web Sites
After a long gestation, I finally completed my Web Debugging course for Pluralsight. This new course covers the details of using the tools in the browsers to debug layout, JavaScript, CSS and networking. While the course shows you how to find the tools in all the major browsers, the focus is using Firefox and Firebug. Though the techniques shown in Firebug apply pretty seamlessly to all the browser tools. This course is not .NET specific, but should be useful to any web developers.
The course is broken up into four sections:
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!
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):
JavaScript for the C# Guy: The Global Object
This is another in my series about (hopefully) interesting JavaScript constructs that might surprise most C# developers. You can see others here: JavaScript for the C# Guy.
Back in the day I was doing some scripting in classic ASP sites (no, not classic ASP.NET) and we screamed and yelled about putting too much in the global scope. We wanted encapsulation and such and that is true today. In my C# work pretty much everything is in a class (static or otherwise) so I don't have to concern myself with it much. But in JavaScript I know there is an easily accessible global object...but it occurred to me that I don't see the "Global" object accessed much; even though it is used a bit (to hold other containers that have encapsulated code). "Why not?" I wondered.
Modern Web Development - Part 9
This is the ninth of ten parts of this blog post. 
The topics will be:
Why do users complicate our lives by trying to view our content on their phone and tablets? It's even an issue for smaller sized desktop screens too. Since this is simply a reality for today's web developer I was glad to see there were real strides in working with mobile.
My Courses
