The modern web is JavaScript. There's no two ways about it. HTML 5 has new CSS, new HTML but the most important aspect of it from an application development point of view is JavaScript. It's the engine. Without it HTML 5 wouldn't be the exciting application platform that it is. Half the posts on Hacker News would vanish.
Last time I wrote about Cassette I was talking about how to generally get up and running. How to use Cassette within an ASP.Net MVC project. What I want to write about now is (in my eyes) the most useful feature of Cassette by a country mile. This is Cassettes ability to ensure scripts are served in dependency order.
My memory appears to be a sieve. Twice in the last year I've forgotten that MVCs ModelBinding doesn't handle regionalised numbers terribly well. Each time I've thought "hmmmm.... best Google that" and lo and behold come upon this post on the issue by the fantastic Phil Haack:
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.
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.
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...
If you're after a version of this that works with Globalize 1.x then take a look here.
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.
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 so named this blog post because it shamelessly borrows from the fine work of others: Sebastian Markbåge and Nathan Vonnahme. Sebastian wrote a blog post documenting a good solution to the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer DateTime problem at the tail end of last year. However, his solution didn't get me 100% of the way there when I tried to use it because of a need to support IE 8 which lead me to use Nathan Vonnahme's ISO 8601 JavaScript Date parser. I thought it was worth documenting this, hence this post, but just so I'm clear; the hard work here was done by Sebastian Markbåge and Nathan Vonnahme and not me. Consider me just a curator in this case. The original blog posts that I am drawing upon can be found here: 1. http://blog.calyptus.eu/seb/2011/12/custom-datetime-json-serialization/ and here: 2. http://n8v.enteuxis.org/2010/12/parsing-iso-8601-dates-in-javascript/