Web Development

A collection of 51 posts

Web Performance

Memcached for C# - A Walkthrough

A while ago I wrote about Object caching in .NET 4. I think that the Object Caching in .NET 4 is a great tool to use for caching and literally takes minutes to get up and running. However, one of the downsides of using the System.Runtime.Caching in .NET

ASP.NET

MVC Data URI HTML Helper

I have recently been looking into web page performance and one of the things I came across is the Data URI scheme. When you reference an image in your HTML, the client needs to go and retrieve the image. This creates an HTTP request and adds to the time it

CSS

Responsive Design and CSS3 Media Queries

Regular readers on this site will notice that there has been a major change on the site lately. The design of the site has changed as well as the layout. I have been playing around with the idea of Responsive design and also updating the look and feel of this

HTML5

MVC and the HTML5 Application Cache

HTML5 has loads of awesome features and recently I have been playing around with a feature called the Application Cache. The Application Cache is designed to allow you to run your web application offline - that is, without a network connection. A web browser that implements HTML5 offline applications will

ASP.NET

C# Parallel Invoke

While working through some code, I noticed a method that I have never seen before. I knew that the .Net 4 Framework had introduced a Parallel Class that helped make parallel ForEach Loops easier, but after some searching I came across the ParallelInvoke() method. So, I jumped on the MSDN

Web Development

Automatic Resource File Translation with the Microsoft Translator Service

On a recent project that I have been working on, we needed the application to be multi-lingual and localized for different countries. The best option for us on this project was to use resource files (.resx) and let .Net handle the rest for us. Now creating these resource files wasn't

Testing

Measuring Web Page Performance with Selenium 2 and the Web Timings API

I have always been interested in measuring web performance, and especially in measuring the improvements in performance. A while ago I attended a Selenium Meetup in London and heard an interesting presentation by one of the QA guys working at Mozilla. He talked about measuring the performance of a web

Web Development

Microsoft Translator API

As the web grows, more and more international businesses are turning to the web. The demand for a multi-lingual website has never been so great. There are currently a few pay services out there that offer a translation API and also a few free ones (Google and Microsoft). One of

C#

Explicit Interface Usage in C#

Where possible, I try and program against interfaces as much as possible. I do this because I like Interface-based programming and because I like the characteristics that it brings to the table: reusability, maintainability, and extensibility. It also allows you to effectively test your code using Mocks. Whether or not

HTML5

Asp.net MVC HTML5 Toolkit - Latest Updates

HTML5 has some fantastic features available to us, and I've tried to add as many of those features as I can to this toolkit. For more information on some of the features available to HTML5 form fields, please take a look at this article. I've added quite a few updates

Testing

Selenium 2 - Get Number of Rows in a Table

I was recently browsing through some of the questions on StackOverflow and came across this question. The question was around how you would count the number of rows in a table using Selenium 2 and Python. If you need a bit of a background to Selenium 2, I have written

ASP.NET

MVC 3 and Remote Validation

I must admit, I've been a bit of a slow starter when it comes to Asp.net MVC 3. I am an avid fan of MVC 2 and haven't really taken the time to look at MVC 3 until now. Wow - I am impressed though! There are a load

Web Development

ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Toolkit is now available as a Nuget Package

Great news for those of you out there that use the MVC HTML5 Toolkit - it is now available to download as a Nuget package. If you haven't already had a look at the MVC HTML5 Toolkit, please read this article for more info or visit the Codeplex site. For

C#

A Simple Guide to using OAuth with C#

If you are a newbie to OAuth you might understand how confusing it can be at first! I started off looking at building a small application that consumed an OAuth service as a side project. I kinda just dived right in without understanding how OAuth worked and got myself very

Web Development

Proxy Authentication - Helper Class

If you have ever created an application that requires you to access the internet or call a 3rd party service over the web, you may have come across the issue of the user being behind a proxy server and having to authenticate. The common issue that I have come across

Web Development

HTTP HEAD Request - Benefits / Usages

Until recently, I had heard of the HTTP HEAD method but never actually used it, or quite understood it's usages. I'm sure most of us have used some of the common HTTP Verbs before such as GET or POST. Let me explain a little bit about the HTTP HEAD request

Web Development

jQuery Mobile - Optimizing your Website for Smartphone's and Tablets

As developers today, our websites are constantly being accessed from different forms of devices - PC's, Mac's, iPhones, Blackberry's, iPads - and the list goes on! Developing websites and content that conforms to all these standards can be a nightmare. Luckily, jQuery has just released a version of their library

ASP.NET

Object Caching - .NET 4

As a developer, we need to use all the tools at our disposal to develop faster and more robust applications. One of the ways we can achieve this is by using caching. Caching is the process of storing frequently used data on the server to fulfil subsequent requests. Now there

Web Development

MVC and the Google Visualization API (DataTable)

Google have created an awesome visualization API. It enables you to add live charts, graphs and tables to your web pages. It is quite flexible and has some great features that are quite easy to use once you get started. I started playing around with this API and decided to

ASP.NET

MVC Experiment : An Alternative to Captcha

I'm sure most of you have at some point been exposed to a CAPTCHA control on the net. They come in loads of forms and are used to tell the difference between humans and computers (bots). If you have a website on the net, you are prone to lots of

ASP.NET

Test your MVC routes with Moq

Routing is a great feature that ships with MVC. The ASP.NET Routing module is responsible for mapping incoming browser requests to particular MVC controller actions. One of the great things about routing in MVC is the ability to rewrite a URL and make it a lot more readable. This

HTML5

HTML5 Input Types

If you've been browsing around the web lately, you may have noticed that there has been a lot of hype and attention slowly building around Html5. Now, I didn't really understand it all until I started to take a look at some of the awesome new features that Html5 has.

Web Development

Set up IIS 7 to run a secure site locally - HTTPS

I've recently been working on a project where I needed to get a development site running using SSL on IIS 7. If its the first time you've done this it can be a little tricky, but IIS 7 has made it super easy to create self signed certificates. You may

Web Development

MVC Google Maps HtmlHelper - Dynamic Maps

I've recently been looking for a MVC helper class for Google maps. I came across this well written MVC HtmlHelper for static Google maps. Unfortunately I was looking for a helper that was for the dynamic version of Google charts. I needed to be able to add markers on the

SEO

Rich Snippets and Structured Data - RDFa

I've always been interested in optimizing this site for search engines and trying my best to make this site as efficient as possible. I recently stumbled across a blog post by the Google webmaster team that explained a little about rich snippets and how search results are returned when they