Archives
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A year of remote working
[Note: I originally posted this on my personal blog, but it occurs to me that it’s likely something of general interest to software developers. -J]
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Real-world SignalR example, ditching ghetto long polling
One of the highlights of BUILD last week was the announcement that SignalR, a framework for real-time client to server (or cloud, if you will) communication, would be a real supported thing now with the weight of Microsoft behind it. Love the open source flava!
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Portable class libraries and fetching JSON
After much delay, we finally have the Windows Phone 8 SDK to go along with the Windows 8 Store SDK, or whatever ridiculous name they’re giving it these days. (Seriously… that no one could come up with a suitable replacement for “metro” is disappointing in an otherwise exciting set of product launches.) One of the neat-o things is the potential for code reuse, particularly across Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps.
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Review: Microsoft Surface RT
Being the ever cautious fan of technology, I ordered a Surface RT within minutes of it going live on Microsoft’s store. I received it Friday, and spent the weekend with it, and wrote a review. I posted that review on my personal blog.
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.NET development on Macs
I posted the “exciting” conclusion of my laptop trade-ins and issues on my personal blog. The links, in chronological order, are posted below. While those posts have all of the details about performance and software used, I wanted to comment on why I like using Macs in the first place.
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From HttpRuntime.Cache to Windows Azure Caching (Preview)
I don’t know about you, but the announcement of Windows Azure Caching (Preview) (yes, the parentheses are apparently part of the interim name) made me a lot more excited about using Azure. Why? Because one of the great performance tricks of any Web app is to cache frequently used data in memory, so it doesn’t have to hit the database, a service, or whatever.
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Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it
(This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.)
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.NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8
I remember sitting in Building 5 at Microsoft with some of my coworkers, when one of them came in with a shiny new 11” MacBook Air. It was nearly two years ago, and we found it pretty odd that the OEM’s building Windows machines sucked at industrial design in a way that defied logic. While Dell and HP were in a race to the bottom building commodity crap, Apple was staying out of the low-end market completely, and focusing on better design. In the process, they managed to build machines people actually wanted, and maintain an insanely high margin in the process.
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POP Forums v10 for ASP.NET MVC 4 posted to CodePlex
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A debugging experience with "highly compatible" ASP.NET 4.5
I have to admit that I will pretty much upgrade software for no reason other than being on the latest version. I won't do it if it's super expensive (Adobe gets money from me about once every three or four years at best), but particularly with frameworks and stuff generally available as part of my MSDN subscription, I'll be bleeding edge. CoasterBuzz was running on the MVC 4 framework pretty much as soon as they did a "go live" license for it.
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Recruiterisms
Once you get your name out there in the world of software, you’re pretty much out there for eternity. This means that your name and contact details will find their way into the databases of recruiters and staffing firms everywhere.
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Worst exception message ever
I'd like to nominate the Entity Framework team for writing the absolute worse exception message ever.
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POP Forums v10 beta posted for ASP.NET MVC 4
Finally got some momentum and replaced the beta formerly known as v9.3. You can get it here, where you’ll find the information below. You can also read my previous post on why I ditched jQuery Mobile.
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.NET development on a “Retina” MacBook Pro
The rumor that Apple would release a super high resolution version of its 15” laptop has been around for quite awhile, and one I watched closely. After more than three years with a 17” MacBook Pro, and all of the screen real estate it offered, I was ready to replace it with something much lighter. It was a fantastic machine, still doing 6 or 7 hours after 460 charge cycles, but I wanted lighter and faster. With the SSD I put in it, I was able to sell it for $750.
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Dude, what’s up with POP Forums vNext?
Yeah, it has been awhile. I posted v9.2 back in January, about five months ago. That’s a real change from the release pace I had there for awhile. Let me explain what’s going on.
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The best computer ever
(This is a repost from my personal blog… wow… I need to write more technical stuff!)
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Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast
(Repost from my personal blog.)
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Impressions on jQuery Mobile
For the uninitiated, jQuery Mobile is a sweet little client framework that turns regular HTML into something more touch and mobile friendly. It results in a user interface that has bigger targets, rounded corners and simple skinning capability.
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Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"
This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More:
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Open source adventures with... wait for it... Microsoft
Last week, Microsoft announced that it was going to open source the rest of the ASP.NET MVC Web stack. The core MVC framework has been open source for a long time now, but the other pieces around it are also now out in the wild. Not only that, but it's not what I call "big bang" open source, where you release the source with each version. No, they're actually committing in real time to a public repository. They're also taking contributions where it makes sense.
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Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects
This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More:
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Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF
This is a repost from my personal blog...
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POP Forums v9.3 Beta posted with mobile views for ASP.NET MVC 4
Download the bits from CodePlex here. Visit a live demo (preferably on a mobile device) here.
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Google AdSense: You suck
Like a lot of Web publishers, I depend pretty heavily on AdSense to generate revenue and pay the bills. A good server isn't free. So imagine my horror when, on Thursday, the numbers dropped between 50 and 80%, depending on the site. Something is horribly wrong.
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Abstracting away issues of HttpContext from your ASP.NET MVC controllers
I've noticed that I write software in one of three modes:
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Using the Scoring Game from POP Forums with your ASP.NET MVC app
Let me tell you a story of HR-discouraged workplace fun. Back in the day, prior to the crash-and-burn of Insurance.com, we had this thing in the development part of the company called the Scoring Game. I wrote about it a couple of years ago on my personal blog. The long and short of it is that we kept a running total of +/-1’s for virtually anything you can think of, for each participant. This was back in 2006, before it became trendy to do it for everything else on the Internets.
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POP Forums v9.2.1 posted to CodePlex, adds only Spanish translation
Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that I've got an updated version of our most recent POP Forums drop. The new v9.2.1 adds Spanish along side of Danish, German and English as available languages. It has no new features or bug fixes, so if you have v9.2.0, and you don't need Spanish, these aren't the droids you're looking for.
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POP Forums v9.2 posted to CodePlex, with new languages, post voting and the scoring game
POP Forums v9.2.0 is the third release for the ASP.NET MVC3 version of POP Forums. It is feature complete, stable, and ready for feedback. For previous release notes, see previous releases.
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Wanted: Language translations for .resx files in open source POP Forums
Starting with v9.2, POP Forums will be fully capable of localization. I'm looking for people who can help translate the .resx file in this open source project, which is fairly straight forward. I'll take help for any language, but I'm particularly interested in: