What are APIs anyway? Everyone’s heard of APIs these days.  Facebook has them, Twitter has them, Hotmail has them, Microsoft Office has them, Windows has them, Mac OS has them, pretty much everything has them.  I’m going to try and explain in simple terms, but also, almost by contradiction, in detail, what an API really is.  [...]

Here’s an interesting example from a brief discussion I was having on twitter yesterday with @DotNetWill. Did you realize that access modifiers in .NET are type specific rather than instance specific. It’s not a weird edge case, it is exactly how the language spec lays it out, but it’s not how most people think access [...]

I was working on a small MVC project where we were dealing with Inherited controllers (SomeController was inherited by SomeMoreSpecificController) and we decided that it’d be nice to have a similar hierarchy of sharing and inheritance at the View level. Unfortunately, out of the box, ASP.net MVC looks in two default locations for your views and [...]

I keep seeing glowing reviews of Bayonetta.  You might have seen it advertised, the game with the “witch” that looks like Sarah Palin, who uses her hair as both a weapon and her outfit, has guns on the heels of her shoes and features in a game that has a button for “dance / taunt”.  [...]

It’s the time of year when people make lists to fill the internet with content, so for anyone that cares I’m going to talk about music for a few moments. In my eyes (ears?) there are three obvious contenders to album of the year but choosing between them is exceptionally difficult… 1. Alice In Chains – Black [...]

At work we’re currently discussing coding standards, specifically to synchronise development in two countries and keep the style consistent across the teams.  You know, the usual stuff.  When people start discussing coding standards, it quickly devolves into a religious debate and honestly, I think a lot of it comes down to personal preference.  Because of [...]

A friend recently asked me about editing items inline using ASP.net MVC, the kind of thing that was auto magically wired up with post backs in “old fashioned” asp.net so I’ve whipped up a small example showing how you can use jQuery to declaratively set up interactive field editing with a sprinkling of Ajax and [...]

I got a message from a friend who was struggling to do an integration piece with the Magento eCommerce Platform using the SOAP endpoint available at http://yourserver.co.uk/api/v2_soap?wsdl. He brought an interesting problem to me, namely that the WCF svcutil executable (and built in Visual Studio 2008) was failing to generate any proxy code when supplied with [...]

With the popularity of service oriented architectures and other buzz phrases related to software as service, good API design has become a significant selling point for any software platform in the past 5-10 years.  People make purchasing decisions based on how easy it is to interoperate with your applications and code and as such the [...]

I feel frustrated at the moment by the endless cyclical debate on the internet (in this case, a comment on Kotaku) claiming games are creatively plateauxing due to their middle age.  People seem incredibly pent up on the games-as-art debate to the extent that they seem to deride anything that the "it’s just a game" [...]