I have put a name to my pain...​

Every now and then you think "x should be easy" - and it isn't. I had one of those situations this morning. Something I thought would take 5 minutes had me still pondering 30 minutes later. I finally cracked it (with the help of a colleague - thanks Marc!) and I wanted to note down what I did since I'm sure to forget this.

Last time I wrote about marrying up Twitter.Bootstrap.MVC4 and Bootstrap Datepicker. It came together quite nicely but when I took a more in depth look at what I'd done I discovered a problem. The brief work on regionalisation / internationalisation / localisation / globalisation / whatever it's called this week... wasn't really working. We had problems with the validation.

Updated 14/01/2013​

Since I wrote this I've taken things on a little further - to read about that go here.

TL; DR - "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."​

A good portion of any devs life is usually spent playing with APIs. If you need to integrate some other system into the system you're working on (and it's rare to come upon a situation where this doesn't happen at some point) then it's API time.

Is it 2003 again?!?​

I've just discovered Xsd.exe. It's not new. Or shiny. And in fact it's been around since .NET 1.1. Truth be told, I've been aware of it for years but up until now I've not had need of it. But now now I've investigated it a bit I've found that it, combined with the XSD/XML Schema Generator can make for a nice tool to add to the utility belt.

Granted XML has long since stopped being sexy. But if you need it, as I did recently, then this is for you.

Documenting a JsonValueProviderFactory Gotcha​

About a year ago I was involved in the migration of an ASP.NET WebForms application over to MVC 3. We'd been doing a lot of AJAX-y / Single Page Application-y things in the project and had come to the conclusion that MVC might be a slightly better fit since we intended to continue down this path.

During the migration we encountered a bug in MVC 3 concerning Dictionary deserialization. This bug has subsequently tripped me up a few more times as I failed to remember the nature of the problem correctly. So I've written the issue up here as an aide to my own lamentable memory.

A while ago I wrote about optimally serving up JavaScript in web applications. I mentioned that Microsoft had come up with a NuGet package called Microsoft ASP.NET Web Optimization which could help with that by minifying and bundling CSS and JavaScript. At the time I was wondering if I would be able to to use this package with pre-existing MVC 3 projects (given that the package had been released together with MVC 4). Happily it turns out you can. But it's not quite as straightforward as I might have liked so I've documented how to get going with this here...

Just recently I've noticed that there appears to be something of a controversy around Unit Testing and Entity Framework. I first came across it as I was Googling around for useful posts on using MOQ in conjunction with EF. I've started to notice the topic more and more and as I have mixed feelings on the subject (that is to say I don't have a settled opinion) I thought I'd write about this and see if I came to any kind of conclusion...

Just recently I was tasked with seeing if we could provide a way to access our Dynamics CRM instance via OData. My initial investigations made it seem like there was nothing for me to do; CRM 2011 provides OData support out of the box. Small problem. We were running CRM 4.0.

Updated 05/10/2015​

If you're after a version of this that works with Globalize 1.x then take a look here.

Updated 27/08/2013​

To make it easier for people to use the approach detailed in this post I have created a repository for jquery.validate.globalize.js on GitHub here.

This is also available as a nuget package here.

To see a good demo take a look here.

This post is plagiarism. But I'm plagiarising myself so I don't feel too bad.

Simplicity appeals to me. It always has. Something that is simple is straightforward to comprehend and is consequently easy to use. It's clarity.

I was recently working on a project which had client side validation manually set up which essentially duplicated the same logic on the server. Like many things this had started out small and grown and grown until it became arduos and tedious to maintain.

Well done that man!​

I have occasionally done some server-side JavaScript with Rhino and Node.js but this is the exception rather than the rule. Like most folk at the moment, almost all the JavaScript I write is in a web context.

I've been a working as a developer in some way, shape or form for just over 10 years now. And it occurred to me the other day that I can't think of a better time to be a software developer than right now

Inspired by Scott Hanselman's post on how he got started in programming I thought I'd shared my own tale about how it all began... I grew up the 80's just outside London. For those of you of a different vintage let me paint a picture. These were the days when "Personal Computers", as they were then styled, were taking the world by storm. Every house would be equipped with either a ZX Spectrum, a Commodore 64 or an Amstrad CPC. These were 8 bit computers which were generally plugged into the family television and spent a good portion of their time loading games like Target: Renegade from an audio cassette. But not in our house; we didn't have a computer. I remember mournfully pedalling home from friends houses on a number of occasions, glum as I compared my lot with theirs. Whereas my friends would be spending their evenings gleefully battering their keyboards as they thrashed the life out of various end-of-level bosses I was reduced to *wasting* my time reading. That's right Enid Blyton - you were second best in my head. Then one happy day (and it may have been a Christmas present although I'm not certain) our family became the proud possessors of an Amstrad CPC 6128:

I wanted to write about a JavaScript library which seems to have had very little attention so far. And that surprises me as it's