Snowing Code

Progressive enhancement for JQuery templates with ASP.NET MVC

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:12:13 -0700

It's been some time now that I'v been looking at backbone.js, playing with the framework and trying to discover its capacities. One of the most important resources in this learning process is the line of posts Derick Bailey has been writing about backbone. One of the recent topics Derick was discussing was using jquery templates for rendering backbone views, while prioritising accessibility and progressive enhancement. In a nut shell, Derick was suggesting using partials for rendering jquery templates, which will then allow us to load them as fixtures in our jasmine tests. The o...

Jasmine Testing Jquery Templates in ASP.NET MVC

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:51:31 -0700

a few weeks ago Derick Bailey posted about using jasmine-jquery fixtures to test your view templates rendering methods. While his post focused on the ruby echosystem, using sinatra, he did mention this should be fairly straight forward to achieve in other web environments, such as asp.net mvc. Since I was and still am working on a backbone example project in asp.net mvc, and am using jquery templates in some of my views render methods, I wanted to give this a go.

At first I thought I will have to specify as my fixture base path my asp.net localhost templates url, which made me think this might end up in a cross-origin ajax request made by the Jasmine jquery add on. Thankfully that was far from the truth; it tu...

Backbone and Knockout- a tale of two frameworks

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 13:42:51 -0700

Recently there's been a lot of talk on knockout.js and backbone.js, two frameworks that provide us with apis of "a clean, extensible foundation on which to build sophisticated UIs without getting lost in a tangle of event handlers" (as the knockout.js homepage states). While a lot of people are saying the two are trying to solve two different problems, it is still rather common to hear both mentioned in the same sentence, and there's a good reason for it I think. Now rather than discussing the difference between the two, I'd like to jump straight into the code and provide my point of view on the subject, but before I do I must say: these ideas, even though I had mulling over them for some time now, I'm not too sure to what extent am I on the spot with them and I would truly appreciate any feedback, critique, questions etc'...

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Progressive .NET 2011

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:57:45 -0700

A week ago I won a ticket for Skills Matter Progressive .NET Tutorials 2011, which got me extremely thrilled and all getting psyched up! So what is Progressive .NET and why am I so looking forward to it? Progressive .NET is a 3-days tutorials course spanning various themes of a .NET developer professional life split into 2 streams of parallel sessions, focusing mainly on our community, open source software and some more advanced notions of development.
Some of the tutorials on offer this year are a couple of sessions on BDD, Gherkin and Specflow, Package management, front end development & javascript TDD, Load testing, Continuous delivery, RESTful WCF, C#5 Async methods and Nancy & Simple.Data.

Now, not so long ago I have started to act as a team leader at work and s...

Sinatra Eye for the .NET Guy

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:49:30 -0700

So writing this blog using Sinatra has been a brilliant experience up until now. The main reason to start hacking around and porting my blog from wordpress to here was obviously education- but not just for education on itself. I think the main lesson was the knowledge I've acquired to make an educated decision in the future, when the opportunity will come up, to use a ruby rack-based framework to build a website. I can honestly say now that next time I'm being asked to build a web site whose major functionality would be to display information- static or without far too much complex presentation logic- Sinatra would be my first choice. The reason for making such a decision would be without a doubt the ruby ecosystem- the wonderful choice of ruby gems out there, the amount of documentation one can find on the web and the brilliant community that'll be alwa...

Git Tutorial for Beginners

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:06:33 -0700

A few weeks ago I've been asked to come up with a rather simple git tutorial for beginners, something that could introduce developers to the most basic day to day functions you'd use. So after I've finished it, I took the time to adapt the tutorials to the 'wider public', so that as many people could use it and so it would be ready the blog. Hope this will help others to get to know git.

1. Initializing a git repository & committing changes locally:

right click on your chosen directory => Git Bash :

git init
Add content to your directory and then
git add -A (stages all changes, ready for commit)
git commit -m 'initial commit' (-m for the message)

(First commit, git would set your user name & email according to your LN email/username)

Functional DI and breaking language boundaries

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 23:24:55 -0700

Today I received a priceless lesson on design, testability, Ioc and the way the boundaries of the development language we know may shape our thinking. It all started with a post by Derick Bailey on design and testability which lit a lively and truly interesting discussion. Derick was basically asking why people tend to demonise TypeMock even though it bares strong similarities to ruby mocking frameworks which are usually hailed by the same people, giving an example of how we tend to abstract dependencies in c# through interfaces, like so:

 public class Foo
{
private doSomething;

public Foo(IDoSomething doSomething)
{
this.doSomething = doSomething;
}

public void Bar()
{
doSomething.DoSomething();
}
}

It appe...

What can TDD do for your SRP?

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:03:55 -0700

A while ago I had the opportunity to do an MVC pagination kata, which proved to be a real educational and inspirational experience.

One of the bits I had written was a class that created the pagination part as an html string, Pager.ToString(), using a StringBuilder it went through a chain of condition and added some parts accordingly. for example I created a page number link for certain condition, or added the first, previous, next and last page links. These became methods inside my Pager class, so that my ToString() method won’t get too big. For example:

private void GetPageLink(int page)
 {
 string url = _linkProvider.GetCurrentLinkWithPageQuery(page);
_builder.Append("<a class=\"pageLink\" href=\"" + url + "\" >" ...