Ryan Hayes

Why You Should Build Your Website Using Static .html Files

If you’ve got a website, then chances are it’s built using a CMS. You know, WordPress, Orchard, Joomla, DotNetNuke. Why wouldn’t you? They let you manage all your content on nice admin screens and PHP, ASP.NET, or whatever serverside technology your CMS is built on will magically and dynamically create your website pages every single [...]

Automating Daily Status Reports with Project Server and Team Foundation Server

In the past, I’ve had managers who have asked me for a daily status report of all of the items I’ve worked on during the day…every single one. They essentially said if it’s not documented that it didn’t happen. With all the tools we have available to us as developers, there should never actually be [...]

ShoelaceMVC, My Newest Open Source Project – ASP.NET MVC 3 Starter Project for Building Fast AND Production Quality Webapps.

I recently came to the conclusion that I needed a MUCH better starter project for building ASP.NET MVC applications. You see, I’m not a designer. I just don’t have those skills. I can make things look good in my head, but I can’t translate that to Photoshop and then to CSS attributes. Then one day [...]

Will XNA be available in Windows 8 Metro Apps?

One of the big things I’ve seen flying around Twitter lately is the question of whether or not XNA is being depricated or faded off into the sunset or whatever. I can understand how if you base your entire career on a single technology this might be scary, but remember that XNA isn’t available in [...]

How to get some of Visual Studio 11's new tools TODAY in Visual Studio 2010

So much has come out this week at //Build/ that it’s hard to keep track of everything. For developers, the big thing is the first preview of Visual Studio 11 and the new SDKs and tools that go along with it. As you download the tools from dev.windows.com or your MSDN subscription, you may or [...]

A first look at Codename: Windows 8 OR "Will there be Silverlight in Windows 8?"

Today at D9, Microsoft opened up about Windows 8 with a bang. Not only does does Microsoft FINALLY have a viable operating system for tablets/slates, but they also announced that the gorgeous new Windows Phone 7/Xbox 360 UI will heavily leverage HTML 5 and Javascript. This really comes as no surprise since IE9 has hardware [...]

"Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 2" with Android and the Team Foundation Server 2010 Eclipse Plugin

Recently I’ve been working on an big Android application where I work set for release later this year. It’s going to be a great help to employees and distributors in the field letting them do all sorts of things they normally need to be at a computer for. I’m using my Macbook Pro to do [...]

Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET MVC and C# SaaS Starter Kit

One of the best ways to learn how to code well is to read code and write it (imagine that!). Luckily, with Visual Studio, Microsoft has graced us with tons of Starter Kits that are free to use. Starter Kits are pre-packaged project templates that are usually completed websites that you can build on top [...]

Using DataAnnotations with Entity Framework 4 Entities for a More Dynamic MVC Model

I’ve been working with MVC3 and Razor lately. It’s been absolutely great. I’ve not used MVC to build a production app until now, and it’s been killer fast building things out quickly. Previously, I’ve just used regular old objects like are in the starter projects to play around with my applications as the “M” in [...]

Periodic Table of the HTML 5 Elements

Have you heard? HTML 5 is out! (er, is coming, depending on how you see things). It’s still a work in progress, but you can still use HTML 5 now with many of the new browsers. What does that mean for us as developers? New things to learn, of course! New techniques, new designs, but [...]