As browsing becomes more commonplace on phones, sub-notebooks and (within the next year or so) Tablet PCs, there’s an increased appetite to tailor your user experience for people using these “non-desktop” devices.  You can leverage your existing application infrastructure without having to create costly or outsource applications for specific (*cough* iPhone) platforms that have lots [...]

A really quick note, MobileTFL, the London Tube status application for Windows Mobile 6+, has just been updated to version 1.1.0.0. Changes: Supported new TFL data feed format, fixed breaking bug. Get it here: http://www.davidwhitney.co.uk/content/blog/index.php/software/ I’m currently an Android user while awaiting Windows Phone 7, so I’ve only been able to test this against unit tests and the [...]

I spent today at Microsofts Techdays Visual Studio 2010 launch event in London.  Lots of interesting stuff, covered in depth all over the internet (just Google, or bing, if you’re a sadist “changes from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0″).  A tiny thing that caught my attention for it’s pure utility to the masses is a [...]

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 [...]