Developing Dane

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I spend time most weekends programming, typically in the evenings over a craft beer at my favorite pub . During these sessions I occasionally perform pressing tasks for my job but most often I use the time to explore and further my craft. Sometimes I watch videos, others I read but mostly I write code. During these exploratory development sessions I like to work with or towards a fully functional application. Hello world style apps are useful for demonstrating components and features but you never truly understand such components until you integrate them into a more full-featured application. A year ago I started the latest of of my exploratory development applications, the fourth in ten years. The new project I named RecipeBox. RecipeBox was conceived as a recipe storage application for the cloud. My wife expressed a need for a simple way to store her recipes and have them readily available from anywhere. Such an

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Getting my feet wet with Azure SQL tonight and I just created my first ever database on the platform. The first step was to create a new server instance since I did not yet have a hosting server. The second page of the creation prompts you to provide credentials for the new server. With no instructions about what to use as a "log in name" I used my gmail account as I would for almost any account name. The database created successfully but I quickly found I couldn't access it at all. I just kept getting authentication errors. I noticed in one of the errors that the user name reported in the failure was the login name I'd initially entered with the "@gmail.com" truncated. This made me wonder if Azure was understanding the "@" character as a domain indicator. I went back to the Azure portal, deleted the server and started from scratch creating another new server. This time around I

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Whether you love your source control system or it drives you completely mad there's no denying it's one of the most important tools you have as a software developer. Over the years I've used several source control software packages, even going so far as to dabble with writing one of my own. They've all had their pluses and minus but I've finally arrived at one I'm satisfied with. My source control software experience began when I took my first job as a software developer in 1999. That system was PVCS Version Manager. I don't remember exactly what version of PVCS we used then but my first impressions were not positive. It was written in Java and the UI was horrific. Every task was painful and files would sporadically appear locked forcing the need to contact the administrator (which eventually became me). In short, I hated it. Our company eventually moved to a newer version of PVCS which im

Pre-Build I left home for Build 2014 on the morning of April Fool's Day after only a couple hours of sleep. I arrived at PDX around 09:00 with my flight to San Francisco scheduled to leave at 11:40. I got through security and settled in at the gate ready to read wile away the remaining time. Around 10:30 they announced my flight was delayed until 12:50. About an hour later they announced the flight had been delayed until 14:10. We finally stared boarding at around 14:30. I kept waiting for someone to say "April Fools" but no such luck. Not a great start to my trip. The flight was uneventfully except for the final descent into San Francisco where we encountered quite a lot of turbulence passing through the lowest clouds. I got off the plane and went outside to catch my shuttle into town. It'd been years since I'd last been to San Francisco but this time my first thought was "this is just like home". The temperature was somewhere around 50-60 degrees

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . The first version of Visual Studio I used heavily was VS 2003 and since then I've used every version typically installing them immediately upon RTM, sometimes even before. I've loved every version and each one has become progressively better IMO. Historically I've spent very little time working directly with HTML files focusing instead on SOA, desktop, and/or Silverlight applications and components. However, over the last year I've been doing quite a bit of work with HTML and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in the out of the box experience Visual Studio provides with its HTML editor (at least in VS 2013). The primary cause of my disappointment stems from the implementation of auto-completion features. Auto-completion is a feature I love when working with C# code but with HTML it gets in the way FAR too often. Let's look at a couple examples that make me gnash my teeth almost every time. T

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I've had my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon for almost exactly a year now so I thought I post a quick follow-up to the original entry I posted last year. First, the keyboard. Within a matter of hours using the original keyboard the enter key started sticking. A new keyboard was ordered and installed and I've had zero issues with it since. I didn't originally think I would like the X1's keyboard due to the separated key layout but I have to admit I love it. I find it very easy to use with just the right amount of tactile feedback for my tastes. It appears my original keyboard troubles were due to a single defective device and not something endemic in the design. Whew! The exclusion of an RJ-45 network port still bothers me a little but it hasn't been a major factor. I still prefer a hard connection when available but the Wi-Fi performance has been exemplary so I can give that a pass. The lack of an

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I've been playing around with TypeScript for several weeks now and, overall, my early impressions are quite favorable. The typing system and its integration with Visual Studio are very nice and seem quite natural to me after working with C# for the last several years. I also like that it produces plain JavaScript as output. I believe this makes more sense than something like Google's Dart because I simply don't believe anything is going to dethrone JavaScript as the top language for web development even if that language provides a superior programming model (see Silverlight). That said I do have a couple of issues with TypeScript. My first issue isn't with TypeScript proper but with the Visual Studio tooling. When it was originally release TypeScript files appeared in the Solution Explorer with an expandable node which nested the generated .js file under its .ts file. At any time you could easily view

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I spent two days last week sitting in on the online stream of ng-conf 2014 the first ever AngularJS conference. There was a ton of presentations and, as is always the case at these things, some were great and some were lacking. Overall I continue to be impressed with Angular and what it brings to the table. A few notes I had. Firebase! Wow that looks incredible. If you haven't seen it and what they called "three-way binding" you should go check it out. Very impressive. Almost every person presenting at the conference was on a Mac. It's seems quite odd to me that most videos I've seen on Angular have been done by a developer using a Mac. I'm not a Microsoft "fan boy" by any means but I am an Apple hater and I simply can't understand how anyone could use Visual Studio then go back to developing with some other IDE. My suspicion is that a majority of Angular programmers are Mi