The art of simplicity

JSLint is a must have tool for every web developer. It’s a JavaScript program that looks for problems in your JavaScript code. JSLint uses a professional subset of JavaScript, a stricter language than that defined by Third Edition of the ECMAScript Programming Language Standard . The subset is related to recommendations found in Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language . The first time I ran it on my brand new ASP.NET MVC application, I was confronted with a lot of errors, most of them related to external plugins and the jquery library. As I am not planning to fix stuff in jquery, I needed a way to tell JSLint to ignore some files. Turns out that this is really easy:

Too hot to go outside? The upcoming weeks you don’t have to. Just stay inside and spend some time looking at the following webcasts: Testing SharePoint - Functional and Performance Testing for SharePoint based applications using Visual Studio 2010 June 29, 2011 During this free one hour webcast we will we'll demonstrate the SharePoint specific testing capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server . More and more SharePoint is being leveraged as an application platform within organizations for both internal and external systems. Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 include features specifically designed for testing SharePoint based development efforts. · Discover new Unit Testing features designed for use in SharePoint projects · Witness the use of IntelliTrace for advanced debugging of SharePoint for both developers and testers to help find root cause and create actionable bugs · See how Microsoft Test Manager can be used to man...

As mentioned by Jeff Atwood, ‘performance is a feature’ . Having a fast and responsive web application really makes the difference. But how do you get there? The best place to start is to have a look at the performance rules list created by the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo. They have identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 35 best practices divided into 7 categories. Content Minimize HTTP requests Reduce DNS lookups Avoid redirects Make Ajax cacheable Post-load components Preload components Reduce the number of DOM elements Split components across domains Minimize the number of iframes No 404s Server Use a Content Delivery Network Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header Gzip components Configre ETags Flush the buffer early Use GET for AJAX requests Avoid empty image src Cookie Reduce cookie size ...

Last week Microsoft announced a change in pricing for the Windows Azure platform. For billing periods that begin on or after July 1, 2011, all inbound data transfers for both peak and off-peak times will be free. This will provide significant cost savings for customers whose cloud applications experience substantial inbound traffic, and customers interested in migrating large quantities of existing data to the cloud. Thank you, Microsoft.

Last week I discovered a useful feature in Visual Studio when you have lots of resources. It’s possible to use wildcards to include files in a project. Imagine you have a lot of files you want to add to your project, you can add them all manually or  you can edit the project file once to pick up all of the files and never worry about it again. How do you this? Right click on the project in Visual Studio and choose ‘Unload Project’. Right click on the unloaded project and choose ‘Edit Project’ Add an <ItemGroup/> block with the following: <ItemGroup> <Content Include="Content\Images\*.png"> <CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory> </Content> </ItemGroup> Save and reload the project.  All files will be self-included. I know that by clicking “Show all” and selecting the files you want to add you get the same behaviour, but it’s still neat.

After creating a custom Workflow 4 activity, I was planning to add it to our existing build process  template. However after adding the activity to the toolbox in Visual Studio, I couldn’t drop the activity on the workflow designer. The reason is that the workflow designer is not able to find the assembly containing the custom activity. There are multiple solutions out there to solve this problem. Probably the easiest one is adding the assembly to the GAC. Two other alternatives are: Adding the process template to a project and reference the assembly from this project. Adding the assembly to a location where Visual Studio will find it (e.g.  ..\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies). If you want to know more about customizing the build process template, I can recommend the following blog series by Ewald Hofman: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Cre...

You already have a build server up and running? Your code gets compiled and tested in a continuous way? You now want to take this one step further and automate your deployment? Let me introduce you TFS Deployer : TFS Deployer is a free tool available at Codeplex. It must be installed as an agent in your test and production environments and supports the execution of PowerShell scripts when an event happens in TFS. In particular it listens to build quality change notifications which occur when you change the quality of a build under the Team Builds node of Team Explorer. How does it work? The way it works is that when TFS Deployer starts up, the service subscribes to the build quality change event notification (1). Then the release manager, using Team Explorer updates the build quality indicator in the build store via Team Explorer (2), the build quality change event is fired (3), the TFS event service then looks up who is subscribed to the event (4) and then TFS Event Service no...