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How to activate your emoji keyboard on Android 5.0 (Lollipop)

· One min read
John Reilly
OSS Engineer - TypeScript, Azure, React, Node.js, .NET

A departure from from my normal content - I need to tell you about emoji! You'll probably already know about them - just imagine a emoticon but about 300,000 times better. They really add spice to to textual content. Oh and they're Japanese - which is also way cool.

TypeScript: In Praise of Union Types

· 7 min read
John Reilly
OSS Engineer - TypeScript, Azure, React, Node.js, .NET

(& How to Express Functions in UTs)

Have you heard the good news my friend? I refer, of course, to the shipping of TypeScript 1.4 and my favourite language feature since generics.... Union Types.

Gulp, npm, long paths and Visual Studio.... Fight!

· 3 min read
John Reilly
OSS Engineer - TypeScript, Azure, React, Node.js, .NET

How I managed to gulp-angular-templatecache working inside Visual Studio

Every now and then something bites you unexpectedly. After a certain amount of pain, the answer comes to you and you know you want to save others from falling into the same deathtrap.

There I was minding my own business and having a play with a Gulp plugin called gulp-angular-templatecache. If you're not aware of it, it "Concatenates and registers AngularJS templates in the $templateCache". I was planning to use it so that all the views in an Angular app of mine were loaded up-front rather than on demand. (It's a first step in making an "offline-first" version of that particular app.)

What's in a (Domain) Name?

· 3 min read
John Reilly
OSS Engineer - TypeScript, Azure, React, Node.js, .NET

The observant amongst you may have noticed that this blog has a brand new and shiny domain name! That's right, after happily trading under "icanmakethiswork.blogspot.com" for the longest time it's now "blog.icanmakethiswork.io". Trumpets and fanfare!

Unit Testing an Angular Controller with Jasmine

· 8 min read
John Reilly
OSS Engineer - TypeScript, Azure, React, Node.js, .NET

Anyone who reads my blog will know that I have been long in the habit of writing unit tests for my C# code. I'm cool like that. However, it took me a while to get up and running writing unit tests for my JavaScript code. I finally got there using a combination of Jasmine 2.0 and Chutzpah. (Jasmine being my test framework and Chutzpah being my test runner.)

Getting more RESTful with Web API and IHttpActionResult

· 3 min read
John Reilly
OSS Engineer - TypeScript, Azure, React, Node.js, .NET

Up until, well yesterday really, I tended to have my Web API action methods all returning 200's no matter what. Successful request? 200 for you sir! Some validation error in the model? 200 for you too ma'am - but I'll wrap up the validation errors and send them back too. Database error? 200 and and an error message.