The Old Development Language Switcheroo

As a C# developer I think I’m pretty safe in saying that its not going away any time soon however, its my opinion that to not become irrelevant you need to have options. Some may argue that its better to be master of one than a Jack of all trades but lets just say you can’t find your next job in the primary language you want to work in. What do you do?

I have looked more into JavaScript recently and with that comes server and client scope for the use of the language so with some understanding of JS that would be probably the best bet for me however, as much as this may annoy some I think I actually prefer statically typed languages.

Now I know there is TypeScript that I could use for my node.js apps but I see that as more of a workaround and not a core feature of JavaScript. I’m not saying anything bad against JS and the libraries/frameworks that I have used I like but I just find [...Read More...]

JavaScript is the future…maybe!

I’m not one for New Years resolutions but I thought it was time I looked at JavaScript more in depth.

I looked at Node.js a while back and found it very interesting and I probably need to go back to it. Over the last month or so there has been a large discussion about async in .Net frameworks and there appears to be a lot of misunderstanding about it (and lets leave it at that, I don’t want to start another flame war) but the thing we can definitely say with Node.js, well JavaScript to be fair is that it is perfectly asynchronous and non-blocking.

As a web developer I have used JavaScript from the early days of Response.Write moving onto frameworks such as script.aculo.us and MooTools and finally ending up with jQuery which has come pretty much a standard these days so my JavaScript skills are not completely new.

However, there has been a large push to use JS more and more for rich user friendly applications with things like KnockoutJS, AngularJS and BackboneJS on the [...Read More...]

Testing your application’s email logic

If you’ve ever written an application that sends out email you may have written the code and executed it numerous times to check that the logic works and that the email appears as you hope. This obviously means you have to hit your SMTP server each time, open your email client and check your emails each time.

Papercut

Reading through my Twitter timeline I saw @TheCodeJunkie asking about the app that you can use to test sending emails from your application.

TheCodeJunkie Tweet

Name that App!

Intrigued, I kept an eye on my timeline and found that the application in question was Papercut

In simple terms you put Papercut on a machine (most likely your development machine) and in your code set the SMTP host to be the IP Address of where Papercut is running and fire up your application and watch Papercut notify you from the system tray that it’s recevied a message.

Papertray System Tray Icon…Read More…]

Node.js, Express, Hello World Formula 1 Style

In my ongoing efforts to be a better developer(plus I just like tinkering) I thought I would take a look at node.js.

I did play with node.js about a year ago where I setup a TCP listener to listen to a TCP Server on the network broadcasting XML messages, I then took these, formatted them to JSON and passed it to a browser using Socket.IO. It was pretty cool but the project never came to anything.

However, I thought I would re-visit and setup a proper development environment on my Mac at home.

Editors

There are many editors/IDE’s that you can use for node.js development such as Vim, Eclipse, WebStorm, Aptana Studio, Emacs and Cloud9 IDE.  As I have used Sublime Text 2 (ST2) before I thought I would use this because I like it and all the cool kids use it!!

Coming from a mainly IDE based background I started to find things a bit hard going however ST2 allows plugins to be used to make the user experience a lot nicer.  Below are a list of plugins I have [...Read More...]