Web Development

A collection of 51 posts

Progressive Web Apps

Determining Service Worker Support for your Site

Have you ever thought about building a Progressive Web App or even adding a service worker to your website? Perhaps you’ve considered it, but weren’t too sure about whether or not your users were on browsers that supported these features. Would they even benefit from their features? Speaking

Web Performance

Getting started with the Picture element

Responsive web design is awesome. It's changed the way we serve content to our users and has allowed us to offer a tailored experience to different screen sizes. It is really flexible and with a little bit of knowledge, anyone can get started. While this flexibility is great, it can

Web Performance

HTTP vs HTTPS performance comparison

Google recently announced that they will be starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal in their search algorithms. This means that websites that serve traffic over HTTPS with secure, encrypted connections will be slightly favoured over those websites that don't. During Google I/O, there was a big push

Speaking

I'll be speaking at Velocity Conference New York 2014

Velocity Conference is without a doubt one of my favourite conferences of the year. It's the conference where different topics such as DevOps, web operations, web performance, and mobile explode into being. Packed with some of the best speakers in the industry; it's a great place to learn and network.

ASP.NET

What is the difference between Build and Rebuild in Visual Studio?

If you are a developer that uses Visual Studio as your IDE, you will be familiar with the Build and Rebuild tasks. I regularly write code in Visual Studio and am used to hitting the Build command when I am developing, but have often wondered what is actually happening under

CSS

Loading CSS Asynchronously

When it comes to web page performance, the size and weight of every resource on the page is important. Large JavaScript and CSS files can slow down your page load times and frustrate your users. There are a number of techniques for loading JavaScript asynchronously and many different techniques for

Web Performance

Automatically removing unused CSS using Grunt

I have previously blogged about the importance of keeping your web pages lean and the impact that unused CSS can have on your page performance. Apart from causing cluttered files, unused CSS can can slow down page load times due to the unnecessary weight of the file. Google Chrome developer

Web Performance

Remove unused CSS in your Web Application

I've previously blogged about my CSS skills and to be honest - they suck! I normally resort to using pre-rolled frameworks such as Twitter's Bootstrap, Foundation or TopCoat. These frameworks are really useful and their components help you get the basics of your UI up and running in no time.

ASP.NET

Extending System.Web.Optimization

The ASP.NET framework is packed with loads of great features and with each release it seems to get better and better. One of my favourite features is the bundling and minification classes that optimize JavaScript and CSS files in a website to reduce file size and improve page performance.

ASP.NET

Working with multiple Web.Config files

When dealing with multiple development environments, it can often be quite tricky to keep track of the different environment specific settings that you may have in place. Fortunately, Visual Studio has a handy feature that allows you to have more than one Web.Config file for different environments. I have

Web Development

Improved tracking with the <a ping> attribute - HTML5

As I sit down at my desk each working morning, the first thing I do is fire up the ever faithful feedly and read through the days' tech news with a cup of coffee. During my usual morning reading, I came across this interesting update from Ilya Grigorik on Google+

Web Performance

A Simple HTML Minifier for ASP.NET

I have previously blogged about the importance of serving your users web pages with speedy load times. Poor web performance equals lost revenue and customers. As you continue to build and improve on the web performance of your site, you will need to look for ingenious ways to squeeze those

ASP.NET

Fast ASP.NET Websites Book Giveaway

Fast ASP.NET Websites has just been released, and if you haven't already gotten your hands on a copy, I have 3 free copies to give away. Fast ASP.NET Websites is a practical, hands-on guide to create faster, more efficient ASP.NET sites and applications. This book offers step-by-step

ASP.NET

Get the number of users that are online using SignalR

In a recent experiment, I was looking for a way to retrieve the number of online users in an ASP.NET application. There are a number of techniques that can be applied, such as incrementing based on ASP.NET session state, or using Google Analytics to keep track of active

Web Development

Fast ASP.NET Websites has been released!

A rather large and suspicious looking box arrived at my house yesterday. To my surprise, it was the first few copies of Fast ASP.NET websites. These have just rolled fresh off the press courtesy of Manning! If you aren't familiar with the contents of the book, it is a

ASP.NET

ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit Update - August 2013

There have been a number of major updates released with the latest version of the MVC HTML5 Toolkit. You, the community have been great, and the majority of the patches and enhancements have been added via the Codeplex site. If you aren't familiar with the MVC HTML5 Toolkit, it is

ASP.NET

ASP.NET Release Checklist

Whenever I work on side projects or make updates to this blog, I like to run a few simple checks to make sure that the site is ready before I release it. When working on side projects, you might not have the benefit of having someone else to help test,

Windows Azure

Guide to configuring custom domain names for a Windows Azure website

Creating a new website is easy and super-fast thanks to an intuitive UI on the Windows Azure portal. You can create a new website and be up and running in a matter of minutes. By default, your new site will normally have a host name that looks like yourdomain.azurewebsites.

ASP.NET

Twitter bootstrap typeahead and ASP.NET MVC - Key/Value pairs

I suck at creating CSS. As a backend developer, I've always managed to get by with my CSS skills, but I've always been jealous of my front end developer colleagues when it comes to their ability to create beautiful web pages. Fortunately, the guys at Twitter have developed a great

Icons

Free icon packs for developers

Over the years, I have started to hoard a collection of links to various free icons that I find on the net. Often, I use these icons to spruce up simple prototypes or just make my web pages look livelier. Unfortunately, I've been collecting these links to icon packs and

ASP.NET

The Google PageSpeed API & MVC 4

I often use tools such as Yahoo! YSlow and Google PageSpeed to profile the performance of my websites. These tools offer useful performance suggestions that will improve the speed and performance of my sites if implemented correctly. They both plug into the browser and can be run at the click

Web Development

How to disable Flash in all browsers

I am currently working in a team where we are replacing an older Flash implementation of a product with a shiny new HTML5 version. Quite often we find ourselves needing to disable Flash in many different browsers as we run through the testing process with the new product. I often

ASP.NET

.NET Caching - File Dependencies

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the built in support that .NET has for in-memory caching. It sits under the System.Runtime.Caching namespace and can be easily added to any application to give you a great improvement in performance. You can store any type of object in

HTML5

Dynamic Favicons using HTML5 Local Storage and TinyCon

I was perusing Github the other day and I came across this awesome little JavaScript library. It's called TinyCon and it's a small library for manipulating the favicon in your browser. It adds alert bubbles and changing images pretty similar to the way Gmail does. It's basically a really fun

JavaScript

Rendering PDFs with pdf.js using HTML5 and JavaScript

The web is full of PDFs floating around out there. How many times have you tried to open a PDF file on a machine and not had the correct software installed? It can be very frustrating. For most users out there they already have the correct software installed to view