Archive for the 'Miscellaneous' Category

YQL Geo library – all your geo needs in pure JavaScript

I just finished doing some talks on geo hacking (slides are available here) and how to use some of the Geo technologies Yahoo and Google provide as part of a University gig in Atlanta.
As a lot of the students liked the idea of APIs like GeoPlanet and Placemaker but had a hard time getting [...]

SVG Wow!

Erik Dahlström and Vincent Hardy have put together a cool website, called SVG Wow!, that showcases SVG doing things you didn’t expect SVG can do:

There are alot of unique demos on there.
One of my favorites uses SVG, HTML5 Audio, Web Fonts, and YUI to play music accompanied by flying animated lyrics (Chrome and Safari only):

There [...]

Ext JS 3.2 beta: stores, components, transitions, and themes

The Ext JS team have announced the 3.2 beta which includes new components and goodness.
Take the animated DataView transitions for example:

On top of that, the release includes:

Multiple sorting and filtering on Ext.data.Store

Composite Fields

Slider improvements

Toolbar plugins: ToolbarReorderer and ToolbarDroppable

New Accessibility Theme: compliant with Section 508 of the Disabilities Act.

Quality Assurance: Unit Testing: over 180 bug [...]

CSS3 Please! Instant results… Thank You

Paul Irish and Jonathan Neal have created a fun example of various CSS tweaks that you can make, and see the results instantly.
CSS3, Please! lets you play with fancy new rules such as:

border-radius
box shadow
gradients
rgba support in backgrounds
transforms
font-face

Really nice way to make tweaks inline in the page….. nicely done. Hope to see some other examples out [...]

HTML Minification

Good old Kangax has been playing with HTML minification and has shared his new tool in an early stage.

What does it do?
Kangax has forked John Resig’s HTML parser which parses the HTML and sends that into the Minifier. This has rules that do things like whitespace optimization, comment removal, and collapsing boolean attributes (e.g. disabled=”true” [...]

Harmony: Canvas Drawing Tool

Harmony is a new drawing tool, a HTML5/Canvas experiment with great potential. It provides some unique brush styles, and can produce some great-looking charcoal pencil style sketches, among other things. Better to try it out than explain it in words.
Creator Mr. Doob (Richard Cabello) explains how he used Canvas to make it darker the [...]

Spectrum Visualization with the HTML5 Audio Data API

The HTML5 specification introduces the and media elements, and with them the opportunity to dramatically change the way we integrate media on the web. The current HTML5 media API provides ways to play and get limited information about audio and video, but gives no way to programatically access or create such media. We [...]

ASMX ScriptService mistakes: Installation and configuration

Continuing my series of posts about ASMX services and JSON, in this post I’m going to cover two common mistakes that plague the process of getting a project’s first ASMX ScriptService working: Installing System.Web.Extensions into the GAC and configuring your web.config.
System.Web.Extensions (aka ASP.NET AJAX)
The ability for ASMX services to return raw JSON is made possible [...]

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Originally posted at Encosia. If you’re reading this elsewhere, come on over and see the original.

ASMX ScriptService mistakes: Installation and configuration

modulr: a CommonJS module implementation in Ruby for client-side JavaScript

modulr is a CommonJS module implementation in Ruby for client-side JavaScript

Ruby? what does that have anything to do with it? Ah, its from one of those Prototype guys isn’t it…. Yup, Tobie is at it again, this time with modulr:

modulr accepts a singular file as input (the program) on which is does static analysis to [...]

Some VS 2010 RC Updates (including patches for Intellisense and Web Designer fixes)

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release.

Last month I blogged about a patch we released for the VS 2010 RC that fixed a bad intellisense crash issue.  This past week we released two additional patches that you can download and apply to the VS 2010 RC to immediately fix two other common issues we’ve seen people run into:

Patch that fixes crashes with Tooltip invocation and when hovering over identifiers

The Visual Studio team recently released a second patch that fixes some crashes we’ve seen when tooltips are displayed – most commonly when hovering over an identifier to view a QuickInfo tooltip.

You can learn more about this issue from this blog post, and download and apply the patch here.

Patch that fixes issues with the Web Forms designer not correctly adding controls to the auto-generated designer files

The Visual Web Developer team recently released a patch that fixes issues where web controls are not correctly added to the .designer.cs file associated with the .aspx file – which means they can’t be programmed against in the code-behind file. 

This issue is most commonly described as “controls are not being recognized in the code-behind” or “editing existing .aspx files regenerates the .aspx.designer.(vb or cs) file and controls are now missing” or “I can’t embed controls within the Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer or the <asp:createuserwizard> control”.

You can learn more about the issue here, and download the patch that fixes it here.

Common Cause of Intellisense and IDE sluggishness on Windows XP, Vista, Win Server 2003/2008 systems

Over the last few months we’ve occasionally seen reports of people seeing tremendous slowness when typing and using intellisense within VS 2010 despite running on decent machines.  It took us awhile to track down the cause – but we have found that the common culprit seems to be that these machines don’t have the latest versions of the UIA (Windows Automation) component installed.

UIA 3 ships with Windows 7, and is a recommended Windows Update patch on XP and Vista (which is why we didn’t see the problem in our tests – since our machines are patched with all recommended updates).  Many systems (especially on XP) don’t automatically install recommended updates, though, and are running with older versions of UIA. This can cause significant performance slow-downs within the VS 2010 editor when large lists are displayed (for example: with intellisense).

If you are running on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and are seeing any performance issues with the editor or IDE, please install the free UIA 3 update that can be downloaded from this page.  If you scroll down the page you’ll find direct links to versions for each OS.

Note that we are making improvements to the final release of VS 2010 so that we don’t have big perf issues when UIA 3 isn’t installed – and we are also adding a message within the IDE that will warn you if you don’t have UIA 3 installed and accessibility is activated.

Improved Text Rendering with WPF 4 and VS 2010

We recently made some nice changes to WPF 4 which improve the text clarity and text crispness over what was in the VS 2010/.NET 4 Release Candidate.  In particular these changes improve scenarios where you have a dark background with light text.

You can learn more about these improvements in this WPF Team blog post.  These changes will be in the final release of VS 2010 and .NET 4.

Hope this helps,

Scott