David Duey

Tiering-Up with Volta

Volta is an interesting Miscosoft technology for .Net developers...

The Volta technology preview is a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. First, design and build your application as a .NET client application, then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers late in the development process. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together.

Generic Programming

Eric Sink is writing a series of blog entries where he compares C# and Java development (language and IDEs).  The series is titled “From C# to Java” and he currently has five parts written.

In Part 5, Eric talks about generics and how C# and Java differ in their implementation of generics.  I have to say, I love generics.  Generic programming is a “must have” language feature for me. 

For better or worse, I generally tend to write my middle tier code in object hierarchies with plenty of collection classes for the “many” side of object relationships.  I like to provide a framework that’s easy to navigate and easy to understand within the context of a given domain.  I think object hierarchies provide a good framework for UI developers or any consumers of the middle tier. 

Anyway, I love generics because it allows me to build object hierarchies very quickly with a lot less code than was required prior to generics.

Mixins

I came across "mixins" via looking into a new language feature coming out in next version of C# (it's in VB as well, so I guess I should say it's a new feature in .Net 3.5) called extension methods.  Extension methods are kind of cool, but I think mixins are really cool because they're an application of extension methods that allow for implementaion along with programmatic interfaces without being forced to use inheritance.  I know that's not a very clear statement, but for any developer, the mixins article is a worthwhile read.

Source Code for .Net Framework

Microsoft is releasing the code for the .Net framework. 

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

.Net Widgetry

I've been doing a little .Net widget stuff lately using the .Net Ajax Toolkit.  I've been surprised to find so little information on creating widgets in .Net.  I assume that's because it's either too obvious an extension to the ajax stuff or it's because widgetry is relatively new.  Regardless, widgetizing is cool if not occasionally frustrating.

Quick Twitter .Net API

I came across a good blog entry titled, Creating a .Net Twitter API in 4.5 Seconds.  It's worth a read for .Net developers who are working on Twiiter stuff.

How's that for a quick post?

Ajax + RSS = Really Cool

I've been thinking a lot about Website content as it relates to RSS for a while now, but my thoughts and ideas on the subject haven’t quite “jelled” yet. However, while I was researching the content issue, I came across a really cool Ajax RSS parser that was created by Paul Sobocinski. Mr Sobocinski's article discusses how you can create a simple RSS news reader using Ajax techniques. It feels like the beginnings of a framework to help tame the Website/RSS content issue. Very good and very cool!

Do you want control over the way your feed appears in the browser?

Render your feed as HTML using an XML style sheet

One of the annoyances of providing links to “raw” RSS feeds is that, without the aid of a feed reader, the links display as XML gibberish in the browser when users click the link to the feed. It’s true, XML is readable by humans, but most people don’t really want to see the raw XML.

Fortunately, you can take control over the display of your raw RSS feed by adding an XML transformation (XSL style sheet) to the RSS feed. The xls file transforms the feed XML into HTML which is then displayed in the browser. This technique works with most of the current breed of browsers.

The xls file is referenced in the RSS feed and can include formatting for the rendered HTML and you can even include a css style sheet if you’d like. The style sheet can be added to the RSS feed as illustrated below (the second line in the example):

<?XML version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?XML-stylesheet type='text/XSL' href='feedgadget.XSL' version='1.0'?>
<rss version="2.0">
.
.
.
</rss>

Of course the XSL style sheet has to be placed in the appropriate directory. In the example above, the stylesheet will reside in the same location as the feed. And, one caveat to using an XSL style sheet is that the feed must be well formed.

One thing to note: Firefox converts XML entity reference characters, such as “<” to the appropriate text equivalent; however, the resulting HTML tags are displayed as text. To overcome this problem, the XSL file can reference a Java script file named disableOutputEscaping.js that will correct the problem so that text is displayed without HTML tags (see the “Attributions” section below).

Some very cool and amazing things can be done with the combination of RSS, XSL and CSS. Take a look at a FeedBurner feed sometime and browse their XSL file and CSS style sheets. They’ve done some amazing things with their style sheets.

Note: IE7 automatically converts RSS feeds into HTML.

Attributions: The feedgadget.xsl file was based on a file I downloaded from an article on the 4guysfromrolla Web site. The XSL file makes use of a Java script file named disableOutputEscaping.js that was created and released into the public domain by Sean M. Burk .