Testing in various versions of Internet Explorer

I found today a nice page with various Virtual machines for testing with various versions of Windows and Internet explorer. If I had my choice I wouldn’t have to test against older versions of IE, or not at all, but we have to honor our clients requirements for their internal IT specifications.

So I thought this might be useful page to others in this situation, so here is the page.

https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

and as an easter egg, scroll down the page to some of the Windows XP VMs and see if you can find the game to “end XP”

Apple OSX trackpad gestures

having recently switched to using an Apple MacBookPro for work I have been looking for tips and trick for using it. Here is one link I recently found, and want to post here so I can find again when I want to refresh myself on them.

http://heresthethingblog.com/2014/04/22/mac-tip-14-gotta-trackpad-gestures/

Async Await deadlock issues

So today while refreshing my skills on WPF I also used some async and await methods and ran into a deadlock issue.

did a quick search and found (on StackOverFlow of course) this Question and answer

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12701545/async-and-await-with-httpwebrequest-getresponseasync

This answer lead me to:

http://blog.stephencleary.com/2012/07/dont-block-on-async-code.html

 

JSON echo test service(s)

So recently I got an email from a friend asking for some help with making some JSON requests to a webservice. Of course since they were in development the service they were trying to hit wasn’t something I could hit from my computer. But that wasn’t really the issue I had as the issue my friend had was with the client not even sending the request.

I was playing with the code they sent in a JS Fiddle (jsfiddle.net) and tried using the JSON echo service js fiddle provides. I got the data to get sent to the service, but couldn’t seem to get a response from it. So whats a lazy developer to do? “google it with bing” and my searching wasn’t productive. I found plenty of JSON test CLIENTS but not any services that would do a simple echo back of the data sent to it.

Of course being a programmer, I whipped up a quick and dirty simple service that did that and moved the JavaScript code from my JSFiddle into a test page in the local test site with the service. I then got it working to a point enough I sent the sample I built back to my friend.

THEN…being disappointed with my “google-fu”, I tried some more searches. And of course after I had rolled my own THEN I found some links that would have worked for me. Actually I found a blog post by Brian Cantoni that covered the same/similar issues he was having. And from that blog post he mentioned two services (both provided FREE by RunScope).

I am listing them here for future reference (for me, and maybe if someone else finds this post)

• http://respondto.it/ – which they(RunScope) designed to use to inspect what data you would get sent back by webhooks (callback requests from another service), before pointing the other service to your real application.
  • You create a unique url for your endpoint
  • then setup JSON or XML data for the response the test service should respond with when it gets hit
  • then you take that endpoint url and enter it into the other service
  • test send to the service and when it sends a request post-processing to you
  • go to the resondto.it site and see what was sent to the endpoint
• http://requestb.in/– which is almost identical to the first one in the list.
  • the biggest difference is not being able to set what response is sent for the endpoint
  • another is not being able to choose the url. You get a random one.

So I hope this helps someone, or me, in the future.

Keep IIS Express running site after debugging stops

Since I just had to find this again, since its so disjointed setting (in my mind) that fixes it, I am posting here fro future reference by me. Now I will just have to remember that I posted a link to this blog for it 🙂

http://mobileosgeek.com/visual-studio-2013-tips-tricks-prevent-closing-of-iis-express-after-stopping-debugging-of-web-application/

My First Windows 8 Application

Well last night I got an email back from the Windows Store certification process saying the second submission of my first windows 8 application was approved. The first submission had some minor issues, and although the report wasn’t perfectly clear on what was wrong I was able to take a guess at what those issues were.

Just like with Windows Phone I used the user group I run in the Northwest Phoenix valley (Site) as subject matter for the application. This is a “minimum viable product” version of the application, so is fairly basic and not that pretty looking. More features and some good UI/UX cleanup will be coming in future versions of the application.

NWVDNUG Meeting Info

Please check it out and install it if you use Windows 8 and leave a review (taking into account it’s a first version with planned updates coming when I can) if you feel inclined to do so.

A good article on Triangles done using CSS

Just got done with reading a good article with some nice illustrations used to show the concepts being presented. If you ever wanted to do triangles on your HTML to use for directing a user’s attention, this is a good article to get you started.

 

http://appendto.com/blog/2013/03/pure-css-triangles-explained/

 

Kendo UI Presentation at NWVDNUG

One of the things I do in the developer community is run a small .Net developer User Group in the Northwest Phoenix Valley. Our site is at http://nwvdnug.org

So our February meeting is this coming Wednesday, the 27th. This month we are celebrating our first anniversary of the group, and will also be hosting our first presenter from outside the Phoenix area.

Ben Hoelting will be coming and presenting “Building Web Applications Using Kendo UI and the MVVM Pattern”. It was requested a few months ago to have a presentation on Kendo UI and Telerik helped connect us to Ben and to being him down for the presentation.

For more information on the meeting time and location you can visit:

http://nwvdnug.org/meetings/details/19

And PLEASE RSVP (to assist with ordering correct quantity of pizza and soda) at:

https://nwvdnugmonthly.eventday.com

Thanks to TEKSystems, as they will be sponsoring the room for this event and will provide Pizza and drinks!

And thanks to Red Gate Software http://www.red-gate.com, I have a copy of their “ANTS Performance Profiler” to give away to one of the attendees.

Resharper – NuGet Plugin

Today while poking around the JetBrains Tools Blog and reading an article about their ReSharper SDK update notifications. In the blog post it mentioned a couple of plugins that are using this feature. And the name of one of them, resharper-nuget, caught my eye, being a bug fan of NuGet and a longtime user of ReSharper.

So I went over to https://github.com/JetBrains/resharper-nuget and perused the home page there and read briefly about it. And it fixes an issue when using ReSharper’s “Add Reference” functionality on undefined types. I will let the following quote from the projects home page describe it better than me repeating it here.

ReSharper has a Context Action on undefined types that looks at assemblies referenced in other projects for that type. If it finds a match, it will add a reference to the assembly, and import the namespace, fixing up the undefined error.

However, ReSharper always adds the assembly as a file reference, even if the assembly is part of a NuGet package. This means NuGet’s referencing is bypassed, and the packages.config file isn’t updated, dependencies aren’t installed, and things don’t work when it’s time to update the package.

This plugin makes ReSharper invoke NuGet when adding a reference to an assembly in a NuGet package.

Check it out, as it should make it easier to use NuGet packages in other porjects in a solution without those being file references, and proper NuGet package references are made so any updates to the NuGet package will smoother.