My Rants and Raves

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.

The third episode of my podcast (“The Hello World Podcast”) is now available. In this episode I had the chance to sit down with Chris at the MVP Summit (which explains the background noise). He is one of my best friends (and my best man at my upcoming wedding).

My pre-order of the Xbox One arrived on Monday and I’ve had a little time to play with it. I mostly got the device for Forza which I love. So after a couple of days with it, here are my first impressions.

I am happy to announce that I am starting a podcast. I’ve been thinking about this for a while but I didn’t want to just do another podcast that talked about what is new in software development.

I recently recorded a new module for ASP.NET  Web API course (on Pluralsight) to cover the new features of Web API 2 (it’s not out yet, soon…I promise).

Are you in the Louisville, KY area this Thursday? I will be! I’ll be at the Louisville .NET Meetup Group talking about Web API..including Web API 2 that was recently released. The details of the event are:

***INCLUDES SPOILERS TO BOOK AND MOVIE***

I finished up my post-con for AngleBrackets today and am ready to head home. I had a great time and just spectacular attendees who had great questions! If you have a chance to go to AngleBrackets (or it’s sister conference, DevIntersection) make the trip. They’re coming to Orlando this fall!

My book about my life as a software developer (The Opinionated Software Developer: What Twenty-Five Years of Slinging Code Has Taught Me) is available for free until October 31st. Consequently this is same the time I am at AngleBrackets  (part of DevIntersection) in Las Vegas talking about Mobile Web, PhoneGap and Designing for Developers.

As the leaves change, I realize that I am going to be on the road a bit this month. I am doing a conference, a meetup and the MVP summit. I just want to get my Skymiles Platinum card ; )

Web API is a pretty sexy REST stack (though others are cool too). As I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, the biggest question by far is authentication and authorization. There are many options including OAuth, Token-based authentication, basic authentication, and even custom solutions. One option that should be included is to use your existing ASP.NET Forms-Based Authentication.

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.

Most developers I know simply hate web design. As far as many developers are concerned CSS is evil. What CSS does for the web is magical but can be painful for developers that are used to functional or structural languages.

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.

One of my favorite features of LESS is the ability to simplify my CSS rules that are deeply nested by using LESS to compose them more simply. I like this feature because it gives me the ability to clean up messy CSS files and make them more maintainable. Take a look to see what I am talking about.

Pluralsight. I am digging in how to handle versioning for an API and I think I've gotten it figured out but it just doesn't work. Throwing a crazy exception and just isn't working. I waste four hours trying to figure it out and I am cursing and grunting. The other people in the coffee shop are staring.

Thanks to everyone for attending my sessions at this year's DevLink 2013 conference in Chattanooga, TN. I had a great time at the aquarium and enjoyed meeting so many of the attendees. If you get a chance, you should add this to your conference attendance next year.

Building a Site with Bootstrap, AngularJS, ASP.NET, EF and Azure". I had the opportunity to use Zen Coding (renamed Emmet for some reason) in the course. We've released a snippet of the course on YouTube that shows off this cool productivity enhancement that Web Essentials powers. Caveat: Web Essentials doesn't work with free versions of Visual Studio.

I want to thank all the attendees, speakers and my compatriots in planning the Atlanta Code Camp. I had a great time helping make this event the best one we've had so far. Some of the numbers:

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.

Android tablets were a joke. I remember being at a MIX when the Xamarin guys (before Xamarin was Xamarin) were showing off Moonlight on Motorola Xoom tablets. I overheard them complain how bad the devices were compared to their iPad test machines. That was PN7 or Pre-Nexus 7. Sure the Kindle came first, but the real switch for Android tablets was the exceptional Nexus 7. They proved that the OS was usable and that a device was desirable. And they did it for $199. The Nexus 7 was a hit…very late into game. They knew that if they sold it at cost or better that people would learn to believe that Android was more than a haven for Linux-heads.

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!