A few weeks ago I went to ‘That Conference’ in the Wisconsin Dells. While I was there, something important happened: I went to an open space about functional programming, and I decided that I wanted to learn a functional language. Great, right? Well, maybe. The problem I had was that I said that I want to learn one, which is easy. I can say that I want to become an astronaut too, but that doesn’t mean that I’m doing anything to move towards the goal post that I’ve set for myself. If I really want to do it, I need…
I came across a particularly aggravating problem today while using a custom Timespan formatter inside the ToString() method override: “Input string was not in a correct format.” The call in question was: So why doesn’t that work? Well if you go to the MSDN page for Custom TimeSpan Format Strings here, you will notice a yellow box at the top of the screen stating that the “TimeSpan format specifiers do not include placeholder seperator symbols”, meaning that we have to put in a backslash to escape the literal we want put in. The string that the ToString override wants is:…
If you’ve been following all the cool new stuff coming in MVC 4, you’ve probably heard of the new Bundling & Minification features. They are seperate, but I like to think of them as parallel concerns. And apparently, Microsoft does too! Look familiar? This is what many sites look like, and it actually presents us two opportunities for optimization. To minify, or not and how to minify The practice of shrinking or ‘minifying’ script and stylesheet files has become pretty common lately, and there are many ways of doing so. Most methods involve either running a script during deployment that…
Ever since database-driven applications have been used to serve data on the web, users viewing that data have wanted to get at it programmatically. Whether it’s for automatically scouring an auction site for a hard to find classic Nintendo game or getting weather updates for your custom alarm clock application, you will probably start looking for a way to get that data into your program. In this blog post, I will cover a basic comparison of browsers vs. scrapers, and then dive into some code to show you how to write a simple scraper to get the rating of a…
jQuery is one of those things that sounds scary to most web designers, but really isn’t. It gives you great power over how the page you’re working on not only looks, but how it acts too. I’m going to assume that if you’ve found this tutorial, youalready know the basics of jQuery but are looking for more control over what’s selected. In this tutorial I will be explaining how selectors work to generate jQuery wrapped sets, and how you can use filters to accomplish thing that basic selectors don’t allow you to do. If you are at all familiar with…
I always somehow end up finding a whole lot of interesting things while browsing the web. While looking for something CSS related earlier I stumbled across this CSS Cheat Sheet, something that I’ve actually had printed out for a long time but completely forgot about until a few minutes ago. This find got me to thinking; what other great little ‘CSS Helpers’ are out there? Being a C# developer, and not a web designer by any means, I need all the help with CSS that I can get! And that’s what this post is about: CSS tools that us server-side…