December 2009
31 posts
[Video] Spark View Engine Park 2 →
Here’s part 2 of the short video series covering the Spark view engine posts. Part 1 is here. Part 3 will have to wait ‘til the new year I’m afraid as I’m *officially* on holiday doing…
[Video] Spark View Engine Part 1 →
I decided to make a short video series covering the Spark view engine posts I did here, here and here. This first part is about installing and configuring Spark in an ASP.NET MVC project…
Extending ASP.NET MVC - Replacing the View Engine... →
One of the many benefits of ASP.NET MVC is its extensibility. It’s possible to replace / add functionality for most of the major components. In this video we’ll take a look at replacing the…
Extending ASP.NET MVC - Replacing the View Engine... →
One of the many benefits of ASP.NET MVC is its extensibility. It’s possible to replace / add functionality for most of the major components. In this video we’ll take a look at replacing the…
The Perils of Blocking Online Ads →
In a fit of frustration the other day, having waited an eternity for some online ad on some now-forgotten site to load, I decided to revisit ad-blocking, something I haven’t done in a long time….
My Most Popular Posts of 2009 →
Inspired by Eric doing this first, I thought I’d dig out my most popular posts of 2009. Most popular by average time on page
An Introduction to the IE8 Developer Tools (Posted in April)
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Adding a bit of Spark to Nerd Dinner →
Right, here we go. Having talked about how to get Spark set up and a little about Spark usage, it’s time to put some rubber on the road and pedal to the metal etc First we need to sort out that…
Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Fx 4 Beta Period...
Full details announced on Soma’s blog. We’ve received a lot of feedback during the beta and as a result are introducing an additional release candidate step in February. The product group will need some additional time to respond to the feedback this generates so consequently the launch of Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Fx 4 will be moved back a few weeks. ScottGu also has more details ...
Extending ASP.NET MVC – Replacing the View Engine →
One of the less discussed aspects of ASP.NET MVC is its extensibility. Pretty much any component can be replaced if it doesn’t suit your needs. Don’t like our ControllerFactory (maybe you want to…
A Bit About Spark →
In my last post I installed and configured Spark as an alternative view engine for ASP.NET MVC. Before we do anything else with it though, we need to understand a little of the syntax. The…
Struggling to explain the UK to foreign...
I know it has been for me at times. There have been very awkward moments when (genuinely) I’ve been asked “Oh, you’re from Scotland? When did you move to the UK then?”. A thorough discussion on the relationship between Scotland, Great Britain and the UK is, well, probably beyond me and probably not what they want. However there is a truly brilliant (and interesting) page on Wikipedia describing...
Shocking Scandal or Corporate Responsibility
Microsoft Blatantly Steals from Startup? A prime example of what I described in my post “Trusting everything you find on the internetz” – ‘News’ (inverted commas) at the speed of light. If you can’t understand how this could have happened in a large organization, you’ve never worked in one. They involve people after all. If you don’t bother to check your facts and understand the full story,...
Web Platform Slideshow →
This is a deck from a session I delivered recently trying to round-up some of the highlights of the next wave of .NET from a web dev perspective. There’s not much of a narrative to it but it hits…
Search Engine Optimisation →
Here I go again on the importance of SEO and the benefits of the SEO Toolkit :). I put together a short slide deck summarising things. The important things to know are [a] it’s good at what it does…
The MIX10K Challenge is back
What can you do in 10kb of code? The grand prize is a trip to MIX10 (along with lots of other prizes). Enter at http://mix10k.visitmix.com/ In case you need some inspiration, here are a few favourite entries from previous years: Paper Ball Turtle# Moustachr BlockSquash Posted via email from mikeormond’s posterous | Comment »
New UK Bing Maps Usergroup
If you’re interested in mapping (who isn’t?) then check out the new UK Bing Maps Usergroup. They’re having their inaugural meeting at the MS offices in London on Wednesday 13th January from 6pm-9pm. There’ll be presentations from Jim Lynn of the BBC and one of the organizers of the group, Alastair Aitchison on Integrating SQL Server 2008 and Bing Maps. Beer and (terrible) pizza provided J ...
MIX10 Registration Open →
Yes, it’s that time of year again when March (and MIX) seem to be both in the distant future and almost upon us at the same time. The conference is billed as: “A 3 day conference for…
First OS Map Data then Postcode data to be free....
As I mentioned back here (http://mikeormond.posterous.com/os-map-data-to-be-free), the UK government plans to make Ordnance Survey map data free in 2010. I noticed that today, the BBC News site is carrying a story that postcode data will also be made freely available (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8402327.stm). Organisations currently have to pay for access to this data - and it’s...
Nice IE8 add-ons from Play.com
Play.com has released a nice IE8 accelerator and visual search add-on for IE8. I was hunting around for Christmas ideas to test them out. Nice touch in the visual search is the inclusion of “top sellers” while the accelerator is visually appealing and probably fits better with my Christmas present workflow ☺. Install from: http://www.ieaddons.com/gb/search/?search=play.com See and download the...
How much would you pay....
…to see photos of Silvio Berlusconi “cavorting poolside with models at his villa in Sardinia”? €5? Interesting comments from the publisher of Europe’s biggest selling newspaper (Bild) given my earlier post about “free news”. Also slightly ironic to read a free story in the online version of a newspaper (nytimes.com) about having to pay for quality content. Posted via email from...
A host of PHP interop content
There’s a nice stream of interop content for PHP developers flowing on the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog. Articles such as: PHP and IE8 Web Slices PHP developers get more choices with Windows Azure, Bing, and SQL Azure Bing search helps PHP developers remedy 404 error pages Building PHP simple database applications for SQL Server, Windows Azure Storage and SQL Azure PHP developers get an...
Visual Studio 2010 and Managing the Application...
Microsoft and Black Marble present Visual Studio 2010 and Managing the Application Lifecycle Thursday 17th December 2009 (10.00-4.30) Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrews Place, London NW1 4LE “Visual Studio 2010 is being designed inside and out to give developers and development teams every advantage in getting the next ground-breaking application to market – quickly. The upshot...
Trusting everything you find on the internetz →
News. Pah. I remember the days when I (perhaps foolishly) believed what I read in the papers. Today somewhat less so but newspapers remain in a different league to much of the so-called journalism…
Become a Web Debugging Virtuoso with Fiddler
I hadn’t spotted that Eric Lawrence (he who wrote Fiddler) was doing this session at PDC09. Thanks to Giorgio for pointing it out. Fiddler is a general purpose web debugging proxy that logs and allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic between client and server. It’s free and can be used to debug traffic from almost any application (ie it’s not just for IE). Posted via email from...
I'm a sucker for a spline
So Charles Petzold’s “Text Deformation Based on Bézier Splines” piece had me from the off. He’s been doing a lot of interesting work with text in WPF and Silverlight and his post includes a link to the source code for this sample (as well as a live demo). Posted via email from mikeormond’s posterous | Comment »
Silverlight 4 and RIA Services
Brad Abrams has a nice walkthrough of his PDC09 session “Building Amazing Business Applications with Silverlight 4, RIA Services and Visual Studio 2010” on his blog but in VB rather than C# (the original session is C#). So now you have the choice – watch it in C# or read it in VB. He covers a lot of ground and there’s some powerful stuff in there. Well worth a watch / read. Posted via...
Deliver better video with IIS Smooth Streaming →
IIS Smooth Streaming is one of those “wow” technologies – watch the video and you get a real sense of just how dramatic a difference it can make to the user experience for media delivered over…
Microsoft AJAX CDN supports SSL
Scott says it here so it must be true. Nice. Posted via email from mikeormond’s posterous | Comment »
OS Map data to be free
I thought I heard this correctly on the breakfast news the other week. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell in the dim, murkiness that is my early-morning waking state. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/17/ordnance-survey-maps-online That should render my spatial data generator obsolete. Posted via email from mikeormond’s posterous | Comment »
The Windows API Code Pack →
If you want to access Windows 7 features like Jump Lists, Libraries, Common File Dialogs, Sensor Platform, Power Management etc from managed code then you need to get your hands on the Windows API…
Tesco's customised version of IE8
If you’re a Tesco customer (and frankly, in the UK, who isn’t?) they’ve integrated a Tesco.com visual search into the search bar and added a special offers web slice so you can see the latest offers without having to return to Tesco.com each time. And of course, you can always install Tesco add-ons if you already have IE8 installed. Visit http://www.tesco.com/ie8/ to find our more and...