Some people fear change. Most people actually. I'm not immune to that myself, but not in the key area of technology. Any developer that fears change when it comes to the tools and languages that he / she is using is in the wrong business. Because what you're using to cut code today will not last. The language will evolve, the tools and frameworks that you love will die out and be replaced by new ones that are different and strange. In time, the language you feel you write as a native will fall out of favour, replaced by a new upstart.

I was recently reading a post by Jaime González García which featured the following mind-bending proposition:

Globalize has hit 1.0. Anyone who reads my blog will likely be aware that I'm a long time user of Globalize 0.1.x. I've been a little daunted by the leap that the move from 0.1.x to 1.x represents. It appears to be the very definition of "breaking changes". :-) But hey, this is Semantic Versioning being used correctly so how could I complain? Either way, I've decided to write up the migration here as I'm not expecting this to be easy.

I don't know about you but I personally feel that the following sentence may well be the saddest in the English language:

Code First Migrations. They look a little like this in Visual Studio:

The Angular UI Bootstrap Datepicker is fan-dabby-dozy. But it has a ... pecularity. You can use the picker like this:

I thought as I start the NgValidationFor project I'd journal my progress. I'm writing this with someone particular in mind: me. Specifically, me in 2 years who will no doubt wonder why I made some of the choices I did. Everyone else, move along now - nothing to see. Unless the inner workings of someone else's mind are interesting to you... In which case: welcome!

So. You want to kick hash based routing to the kerb. You want real URLs. You've read the HTML5 mode section of the Angular $location docs and you're good to go. It's just a matter of dropping $locationProvider.html5Mode(true) into your app initialisation right?

Wrong.

Further posts on this topic​

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.

In the name of DRY I found myself puzzling how one could take a PartialViewResult and render it as a string. Simple, right?

Sometimes, you just miss things. Something seismic happens and you had no idea. So it was with tsconfig.json.

This is very probably the dullest title for a blog post I've ever come up with. Read on though folks - it's definitely going to pick up...

I've done it. I've open sourced the website that I maintain for my aunt what is a nun. Because I think we can all agree that nuns need open source and continuous integration about as much as anyone else.

(& 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.

"Automation, automation, automation." Those were and are Tony Blair's priorities for keeping open source projects well maintained.

There's a small open source project I'm responsible for called jQuery Validation Unobtrusive Native. (A catchy name is a must for any good open source project. Alas I'm not quite meeting my own exacting standards on this particular point... I should have gone with my gut and called it "Livingstone" instead. Too late now...)

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.)

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!

Coded UI, IE 11 and the "runas" problem​