August 2011 - Posts
Microsoft recently released the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.4 (August 2011) update which includes a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Role project template which makes it easier to deploy an MVC 3 application to Azure. Let’s walk through this process end-to-end. Step 1 – Install the tools Install the Windows Azure Tools via WebPI. This will also install any dependencies that are missing. Step 2 – Create and run the application (locally) Launch Visual Studio as an administrator . The Azure storage emulator requires administrator privileges. Create a new Windows Azure Project (look under Cloud templates). In the next dialog, we see the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Role project type. Double click on it to add it to the Windows Azure...
This is me shaving a yak. Shaving the yak, if you don't know, is what you do when a seemingly simple task necessitates many recursive and unforeseen sub-tasks in order to be carried out. The story goes like this… Let's say that I want to paint a picture, but I'm in a shack in the middle of the desert and I don't have a canvas, brushes or paint. I do have a piece of strong cloth, a few pieces of wood, and the rocks around the shack can provide some pigments that I can mix with some oil. For the nails, I can extract some from the shack's structure itself. For the brush, I'll need some quality hair. Well, long story short, before I know it, here I am, in the middle of the desert, shaving a yak. Today's metaphorical yak...
SVG definitely is an increasingly interesting skill, especially as it's making its way into HTML 5 as an officially allowed grammar inside of HTML documents. Most SVG is authored through some kind of tool, and it's absolutely the way to go for artistic drawings. I used Inkscape (open source) and Expression Design in the past for that (I can't afford Illustrator ), and I've been happy with the results (to your right and left). When you are doing this kind of artwork, the quality of the generated SVG doesn't matter much, and well, it's a good thing as what those tools spit out is rather horrendous. Think HTML from Word. There is a category of drawing though that is better authored by hand, because it needs to be human-readable...
In Orchard, the UI gets composed from many independent parts. We wrote a lot of code to handle that fact without friction. It is easy to add a new part or remove an existing one without breaking anything. One ingredient in this is the placement.info file . The role of placement is to dispatch the shapes that represent content types to local zones and to specify in what order they should appear. it separates the templates and their orchestration, implementing some healthy separation of concerns. It is quite powerful and flexible, but it represents a sort of inversion of control that can be quite puzzling to designers: we are used, in other systems, to the layout pulling the different "includes" that constitute it. With placement, the...
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