A Passion Developer

Daily Reading - Tuesday, April 29 2014

2014-04-29T00:00:00+07:00

Tutorial: getting started with Pop
Pop is an extensible animation engine for iOS and OS X. In addition to basic static animations, it supports spring and decay dynamic animations, making it useful for building realistic, physics-based interactions. It's a mature and well-tested framework that drives all the animations and transitions in Paper

iPads and tablet growth

looking at tablets and smartphones as mobile devices in a new category that competes with PCs may be the wrong comparison - in fact, it may be better to think of tablets, laptops and desktops as one 'big screen' segment, all of which compete with smartphones, and for which the opportunity is just smaller than that for smartphones. And so tablets will over time eat away at laptop and desktop sales just as laptops ate away at desktop sales, but the truly transformative new category is the smartphone. Maybe

Daily Reading - Monday, August 27 2013

2013-08-27T00:00:00+07:00

Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth

The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That's the way the government does things. They do something really big that's really bad, and they think, Well, we'll make it better, and then it never gets better.

Martin Fowler - GivenWhenThen

Offline Techniques & Sencha Touch

Reddit: Lessons Learned From Mistakes Made Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month

Give users a little bit of power, see what they do with it, and turn the good stuff into features. One of the biggest revelations for me was how much reddit learns from its users and how much it relies on users to make the site run smoothly. Users are going to tell you a lot of things you don’t know

Daily Reading - Tuesday, August 13 2013

2013-08-13T00:00:00+07:00

Windows Azure: SQL Server Always On Support and Notification Hubs, AutoScale
With SQL Server AlwaysOn within Windows Azure VM, we can use a single connection to connect to the Availability Group Listener endpoint. The load balancer will route requests to primary or secondaries replica.
New Schedule AutoScale feature allows us to scale instances with a specific time frame. We can setup our website to scale up in the morning and scale down in the evening automatically.

Why are we attracted to beautiful things?

OWASP Top Ten Security Risk in 2013

Can a software developer be a successful entrepreneur?

Do things, write about it

you need to do only two things to put yourself in a position to encounter interesting work: make something cool and then tell people about it.

Inspiring me, this is exact what I am trying to do. Write some useful posts, push them to Github pages.

Daily Reading - Friday, August 12 2013

2013-08-12T00:00:00+07:00

Message handlers scoped per route in ASP.NET Web API

Glimpse 1.6.0 released
Add server clock time to HUD, sometime there is a difference between client and server time.

Language Wide Features CSS

Group and Display Data with Underscore and AngularJS

Easily A/B Test Your Website's Call-to-Action Using Content Experiments API

I'm 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook

In the end, Facebook has been trying too hard. Teens hate it when people try too hard; it pushes them away. It’s like if my mom told me not to do something — I immediately need to do it. When she forces something on me, I really don’t want to do it.
Teens just like to join in on their own. If you’re all up in their faces about the new features on Facebook, they’ll get annoyed and find a new social media.

The Importance of Realism in Startups

95 Ways to find your first customers for customer development or your first sale

Daily Reading - Thursday, August 08 2013

2013-08-08T00:00:00+07:00

5 Steps to $5,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue
A good story of StatusPage.io from idea to revenue.

Visual Studio 2013: Insert a Line
Useful feature, just press CTRL+ENTER or CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to insert a line above or below the cursor.

The single most reckless, idiotic, wonderful app ever is here!
This app is brilliant idea. Throw your phone as high as you can, then it uploads your height to a leaderboard to compare with other height. It's thrilled game, but it's fun.

Green Slate
Make your github's contribution green by an automated push everyday. It's just fun but meaningless

Daily Reading - Wednesday, August 07 2013

2013-08-07T00:00:00+07:00

W3C Web Storage API Now In Recommendation Status

The JavaScript Cheese is Moving: Data-Oriented vs. Control-Oriented Programming

insertAdjacentHTML
A useful method, I don't know its existence yet.

Well, I like Team Foundation Server and I like Git, but which is better?

Top 15 most talked-about web design trends

10 simple things you can do today that will make you happier

Lean analytics: Five lessons beyond the basics

The Origin of Tweet
An interesting story of the verb 'tweet'

Daily Reading - Tuesday, August 06 2013

2013-08-06T00:00:00+07:00

Some AngularJS pitfalls

Directories for JavaScript resources

Javascript Patterns
A big collection of JS patterns. It's worth reading

Animating with AngularJS

Taking Control of Image Loading

Focus

Focus is critical when you are three people, when you are twenty-five people, five hundred people, and ten thousand people. You can always get farther faster by saying no to too many projects and too many priorities. Pick your shots carefully and hit them. That's what Jobs did to turn around Apple and that's what you can do with your company too.

Daily Reading - Saturday, August 03 2013

2013-08-03T00:00:00+07:00

5 Myths About Mobile Web Performance
Javascript CPU performance does not affect mobile app performance as DOM Interaction, SVG, Canvas

Chasing Problems?

Solr in Action: Solr Features
New Solr 4 book.

The highest ROI way to increase signups: Make a minimal homepage

Daily Reading - Thursday, August 02 2013

2013-08-02T00:00:00+07:00

My ranked list of priorities for Backend Web Programming: Scalability > Maintainable code > performance

Git Best Practices

Pagespeed Insights for devices

JS Wake Event

A Glimpse into the Gut of your ASP.NET application

A Week with Bootstrap 3

Best New Features in Bootstrap 3.0

Daily Reading - Wednesday, July 31 2013

2013-07-31T00:00:00+07:00

Appcelerator Survey on Mobile Development

Your app makes me fat
A very good post of cognitive resource.

Android vs. iOS: Comparing the Development Process of the GQueues Mobile Apps

Dial up: Why startups should use the phone

A meta style guide for JavaScript

An Overview of the NuGet Ecosystem

Origin is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin with AngularJS

Daily Reading - Tuesday, July 30 2013

2013-07-30T00:00:00+07:00

The Future Beyond Flat Design

MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0

Handlers.js a behind the scenes look

Using AngularJS? Stop using jQuery as a crutch

How do I “think in AngularJS/EmberJS(or other client MVC framework)” if I have a jQuery background?

Redis at Twilio and What can be learned from an incident

Writing an AuthenticationHandler for Katana

Daily Reading - Sunday, July 28 2013

2013-07-28T00:00:00+07:00

What is an Event Store?

Modern HTTP benchmarking tool

So, Don’t Do That

Design is about making tradeoffs. Any decision to optimize in one place in the design usually means the opposite for another place. All design involves compromise, where something is favored at the expense of something else.

Daily Reading - Friday, July 26 2013

2013-07-26T00:00:00+07:00

Zipkin A distributed tracing system, from Twitter

Marketing with Asana: The Tools We Use

Shipping Is The Beginning Of A Process

Cross-Development: Common code base for Node and the Browser

Bone.io Realtime HTML5 Framework

JointJS JavaScript Diagramming Library

Daily Reading - Thursday, July 25 2013

2013-07-25T00:00:00+07:00

Meteor - Web Development Like You Never Seen

More Git And Github Secrets

ReactiveJS
A lightweight reactive dom instead of heavy framework EmberJS, AngularJS

Daily Reading - Tuesday, July 23 2013

2013-07-23T00:00:00+07:00

10 things in SQL Server which don't work as expected

AlwaysOn Availability Groups Real-Life Lessons Learned

Angular - the Component Orientedness It make me Happy

Building Scalable Applications in .NET: Introducing the FatDB Distributed Computing Platform

FP vs. OO, from the trenches

An MVP is not a Cheaper Product, It’s about Smart Learning

Daily Reading - Saturday, July 20 2013

2013-07-20T00:00:00+07:00

How is Candy Crush Saga Raking in the Millions?

ZenCoding in Visual Studio

What Really Makes Free Mobile Apps So Profitable?

Github Code Search API

Don't Tell Them its REST

"start with the README" to build a minimal initial API and then evolve it based on usage experience. Don't attempt to include too many features up front.
"mocking" is a bad practice, the problem with mocking is that your tests are detached from reality, we should populate a local database with live data to perform continuous integration testing without resorting to mock

Rule of Three

The solution we constructed in Discourse was a decent start, but woefully incomplete – even wrong in some areas. The only way we can figure this out is by slowly running the solution through its paces with our three partners, to live in the same house of software they do as roommates, to walk alongside them as they grow their discussion communities and do everything we can to help build it into a community we enjoy as much as everyone else does. And when there were only one set of footsteps in the sand, well … that's because we were carrying you.

Startup Lessons: Dynamic Org Structures

Daily Reading - Thursday, July 18 2013

2013-07-18T00:00:00+07:00

Q&A with Google’s Polymer team

Simulating a Slow Internet Connection
Fiddler on Windows and Network Link Conditioner (SLOW YOUR APP’S ROLL )on Mac are good methods.

Responsive JavaScript in Rails

OWIN, Katana and SignalR

node-webkit develop desktop apps using NodeJS and HTML5
It's cool, just using web technology to develop desktop apps without learning Win32, .NET, or Object-C. Microsoft also has a similar technology Javascript Runtime Hosting based on IE11, but there is no document about it.

The Psychology of Color in Marketing and Branding

Daily Reading - Wednesday, July 17 2013

2013-07-17T00:00:00+07:00

JavaScript Editor Improvements in Visual Studio 2013 Preview
2 useful enhancement for JS editor: identifier hightlight and navigation bar.

Authentic Design

Practical NoSQL experiences with Apache Cassandra

Identify data access patterns, then the model data to support those access patterns. The database is optimized for key-oriented data access and data model must be denormalized

Outbrain touches over 80% of all US online users with help from Cassandra

We look at how the data will be queried, its size, and how it needs to be distributed. We might use things like MySQL for historical reasons and MongoDB for smaller tasks, and then Cassandra for situations where data doesn’t all fit into memory or where it spans multiple machines and possibly data centers.

The primary thing is to do your data modeling in a way that fits with Cassandra. Don’t treat it like MySQL, Mongo, or a pure KV store and you’ll get the full benefits of it’s replication and caching models. Get that right and your management and maintenance isn’t hard

Re-imagining Segmentation In Analytics To Help You Make Better Decisions, Faster

How Heroku Works

Understanding Sass Lists

Path.To - Six Lessons That Might Have Saved Our Business Had We Learned Them Earlier

Daily Reading - Tuesday, July 16 2013

2013-07-16T00:00:00+07:00

Why Behavior Change Apps Fail To Change Behavior

To change behavior, products must ensure the user feels in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.

GitHub's on your phone

Dropbox Datastore bindings for AngularJS

What’s a (Good) REST API?

My experience with TypeScript

Measuring performance of the user experience

Responsive Design Patterns

Daily Reading - Monday, July 15 2013

2013-07-15T00:00:00+07:00

Do Things that Don't Scale

Eight Cool Features Coming in ES6

Beyond Helium

What’s New in IE11′s Developer Tools

Daily Reading - Saturday, July 13 2013

2013-07-13T00:00:00+07:00

JavaScript, the winning style

Exploring the Architecture of the NuoDB Database

Daily Reading - Friday, July 12 2013

2013-07-12T00:00:00+07:00

Quick Tip: Name Your SASS Variables Modularly

15 sites to find free fonts

“Enable Edit and Continue” is now on by Default

Reactive Extensions (Rx) libraries for Python and Ruby

Form validation with AngularJS

Frontend Optimizations you can do right now

Inattention Blindness – Maybe Users Really Don’t See

Interviewing with Startups: Tips for Designers

Daily Reading - Thursday, July 11 2013

2013-07-11T00:00:00+07:00

The virtual Tug of War

Protecting the target demands a change in mindset for how we approach security. Until now, the name of the game has been breach prevention, essentially ensuring the “good guys” stayed on the inside and the “bad guys” remained on the outside

With new stealthy and sophisticated attacks being launched daily, most organizations are beginning to realize it is no longer a question of whether the company is breached or not; it is simply a matter of when. The mindset is moving from “breach prevention” to “breach acceptance.”
This can be accomplished by deploying the following:

Encryption: When data is encrypted, it is only useful to people who hold the decryption key. Encryption can be deployed “end-to-end”, between datacenters, virtual machines, devices.

Authentication: ensures only authorized personnel have access to specific bits of information. This granular form of access control exposes data only to the right people and eliminates exposing critical data to those that should not have it, thereby increasing security

Useful Github Patterns

Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%

5 Dangers of Flat Design

Move Fast and Break Things

Hyperloop - New Transportation System
It's going to be not a fiction any more. There is a company building it.

Daily Reading - Wednesday, July 10 2013

2013-07-10T00:00:00+07:00

Cross-Platform Portable Class Libraries with .NET are Happening

Richer access to Google services and better OS integration in Chrome packaged apps
We can use Identity API, In App Payments API, Analytics API, Bluetooth API, Native Messaging API to develop desktop-like Chrome packaged app.

Resource-Level Permissions for EC2 and RDS Resources

Why Ruby rocks

Web Audio API comes to Firefox

Here are some examples of the features:

Scheduling events to happen at exact times during audio playbacks

Various types of audio filters to create effects such as echo, noise cancellation, etc.

Sound synthesis to create electronic music

3D positional audio to simulate effects such as a sound source moving around the scene in a game

Integration for WebRTC to apply effects to sound coming in from external input (a WebRTC call, a guitar plugged in to your device, etc.) or to sound which is transmitted to the other party in a WebRTC call

Analysing the audio data in order to create sound visualizers, etc.

TIOBE Programming Community Index for July 2013
PHP is raising again.

How to Work Remotely and Still Be the Best

Getting started with remote work can be quite an adjustment, both for you and the client. I’ve had it go very right, and very wrong. But, when it goes right, it can be an excellent way for clients or employeers to solve the “talent crunch” problem, and create a wider range of opportunities for developers who live outside major technological centers or “startup” hubs.

12 Lessons I learned using unit tests/TDD

Cassandra and .NET

Daily Reading - Tuesday, July 09 2013

2013-07-09T00:00:00+07:00

What powers Power BI in Office 365?

Power BI for Office 365 is a new self-service business intelligence (BI) offering enabling businesses to gain insights from their data in powerful new ways within Excel and Office 365. Customers now have the ability to easily search, discover and access data inside and outside of their organization and, with just a few clicks, shape and transform that data. They can also analyze and create stunning interactive visualizations that uncover hidden insights to share and collaborate from virtually anywhere, on nearly any device.

Promises/A+

This proposal clarifies the behavioral clauses of the Promises/A proposal, extending it to cover de facto behaviors and omitting parts that are underspecified or problematic.

Javascript Runtime Hosting
With IE11, we can use web technology to develop desktop application beside Win32 and .NET Winform, WPF. It's cool but there is no document or examples right now.

When should I use an ORM?
We should use ORM when domain model is not complex and throughput is not high.

Signs you're veering from good API design

tangle - reactive document library

20 Lessons I Learned Leading A Growth/Marketing Team (Part 1)

Daily Reading - Monday, July 08 2013

2013-07-08T00:00:00+07:00

Cube26, making it possible for computers to understand our emotions

Ember.js Persistence Foundation

chess.js A Javascript chess library for chess move generation/validation

The Technology behind Codenvy. An Interview with Tyler Jewell, CEO

UI Principles for Great Interaction Design

Accessible RWD

Daily Reading - Sunday, July 07 2013

2013-07-07T00:00:00+07:00

Vim 7.4a ready for beta testing

Art of Node

The Easiest Way in the World to Share Files P2P
Share files through WebRTC without need for plug-ins, software.

Are You Missing the Point of Social Media?

A social media page should be full of questions to customers, contests, and personalized responses to fan comments. The more engaging the content, the more personalized the responses are, and the more involved your customer community is, the more successful your social media campaign will be.

5 Secrets Entrepreneurs Will Never Reveal

Daily Reading - Saturday, July 06 2013

2013-07-06T00:00:00+07:00

DevTools Extensions For Web App Developers

MongoDB - Limiting Collection Size

Redis - Caching Server

Real-time big-data!

How Do You Know Your Metrics Are Any Good

Getting started with OWIN

2013-07-05T00:00:00+07:00

Owin is an Open Web Interface for .NET, it describes how components in a HTTP pipeline should communicate, like NodeJS Connect or Rack.

Owin has one main interface, every components will communicate through this interface.

Func<IDictionary<string, object>,Task>

//Actual implementation
public Task Invoke(IDictionary<string, object> environment) 
{ 
   var someObject = environment[“some.key”] as SomeObject; 
   // etc… 
}

Owin specs contains details of IDictionary object.

Owin host will composes multiple middlewares into a application. It will implement the following interface

public interface IAppBuilder 
{ 
    IDictionary<string, object> Properties { get; }

    object Build(Type returnType); 
    IAppBuilder New(); 
    IAppBuilder Use(object middleware, params object[] args); 
}

We compose middlewares in Configuration method of Startup class. When OwinHost starts, it looks into Configuration method to build up middlewares of our app.

public class Startup
{
  public void Configuration(IAppBuilder builder)
  {
      builder.Use(typeof(Logger));      
  }
}

Let build a simple logger and a request handler middleware

Create new blank MVC4 (or MVC5) project OwinTest
Add the following packages:

Install-Package Owin
Install-Package Install-Package Microsoft.Owin.Host.HttpListener -Pre
Create a new class Logger and enter the following code

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using AppFunc = System.Func<System.Collections.Generic.IDictionary<string, object>, System.Threading.Tasks.Task>;

public class Logger
{
    private readonly AppFunc _next;
    public Logger(AppFunc next)
    {
        if(next == null)
        {
          throw new ArgumentNullException("next");
        }
        _next = next;
    }
    public Task Invoke(IDictionary<string, object> environment)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} {1}",DateTime.Now, environment["owin.RequestPath"]));
        return _next(environment);
    }
}

Create a class Startup and enter the following code

public class Startup
{
  public void Configuration(IAppBuilder builder)
  {
      builder.Use(typeof(Logger));      
  }
}

Download Katana hosting, extract to C:\ (or any folder)
Open Project property, confiure Start external program
Press F5 and browse http://localhost:8080 the console will show like this
Add a class HelloRequestHandler and enter the following code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Globalization;
using System.IO;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using AppFunc = System.Func<System.Collections.Generic.IDictionary<string, object>, System.Threading.Tasks.Task>;

public class HelloRequestHandler
{
    private readonly AppFunc _next;
    public HelloRequestHandler(AppFunc next)
    {
        if(next == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("next");
        }
        _next = next;
    }
    public Task Invoke(IDictionary<string, object> environment)
    {
        IDictionary<string, string[]> responseHeaders =
                (IDictionary<string, string[]>)environment["owin.ResponseHeaders"];
        var responseBytes = System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.UTF8.GetBytes(
                     string.Format("<h1>Hello world</h1>"));
        Stream responseStream = (Stream)environment["owin.ResponseBody"];

        responseHeaders["Content-Length"] = new string[] { responseBytes.Length.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) };
        responseHeaders["Content-Type"] = new string[] { "text/html" };
        responseStream.Write(responseBytes, 0, responseBytes.Length);

        return _next(environment);
    }
}

Add HelloRequestHandler middleware to Startup class

public class Startup
{
  public void Configuration(IAppBuilder builder)
  {
      builder.Use(typeof(Logger));
      builder.Use(typeof(HelloRequestHandler));
  }
}

Press F5 and browse http://localhost:8080 we will see the result like this

ASP.NET MVC5, WEB API 2, SignalR are compatible with OWIN, so we can compose middlewares or develop middlewares for our application's need.

Daily Reading - Friday, July 05 2013

2013-07-05T00:00:00+07:00

Cool New APIs in Windows 8.1 #1: WebView for HTML
It allows the app to invoke script within the webview and the webview to raise events to the app. It's pretty cool. See more msdn WebView

Top Reasons Developers Should Use Windows Azure Mobile Services

DataStax's Cassandra C# Driver is now final

This C# driver also comes with an ADO.NET module to make it simpler to integrate with existing applications or libraries and a Linq module to improve developer productivity.

Visual Studio 2013 Heap View

Puma vs Phusion Passenger

Async/Await – Performance Overheads and Other Pitfalls

Windows and Line of Business Applications: No Good Options
WinRT is not ready, and it's not full .NET. Silverlight is dead. WPF is no improvement. The future of LOB app is HTML5. WebGL, Canvas, WebSocket, WebWorker... make web site more application friendlier. Typescript, Dart allow to write a large scale web app.

Elon Musk Explains the Fallacy of Learning from Failure

"Failure sucks. If anyone tells you they learn more from failure than success, then they’re wrong. You learn more from success. There are many more ways to fail than there are to succeed. If you've found the one thing that succeeds, that’s great."

Daily Reading - Thursday, July 04 2013

2013-07-04T00:00:00+07:00

What is New in Code Analysis for Visual Studio 2013
VS 2013 improves categories and sorting result in code analysis.

SQL 2014 In-Memory OLTP ‘Hekaton’: training videos and white papers
A collection of videos and blog posts to get started with Hekaton.

Why Mac has Command key

Sizing (Web) components
By using EM unit, we can easily change component's size when its font size change.

.Component {
  font-size: 16px;

  width: 5em;
  height: 2em;
  border-radius: .5em;
  border: 1px solid gold;
}

Daily Reading - Tuesday, July 02 2013

2013-07-02T00:00:00+07:00

Enough with the JavaScript already!

Design Patterns after Design is Done

A study on design patterns and software quality at the University of Montreal (2008) found that design patterns in practice do not always improve code quality, reusability and expandability; and often makes code harder to understand. Some patterns are better than others: Composite makes code easier to follow and easier to change. Abstract Factory makes code more modular and reusable, but at the expense of understandability. Flyweight makes code less expandable and reusable, and much harder to follow. Most developers don’t recognize or understand the Visitor pattern. Observer can be difficult to understand as well, although it does make the code more flexible and extendible. Chain of Responsibility makes code harder to follow, and harder to change or fix safely. And Singleton, of course, while simple to recognize and understand, can make code much harder to change.

Whether you’re designing and writing new code, or changing code, or refactoring code, the best advice is:

Don’t use patterns unless you need to.

Don’t use patterns that you don’t fully understand.

Don’t expect that whoever is going to work on the code in the future to recognize and understand the patterns that you used – stick to common patterns, and make them explicit in comments where you think it is important or necessary.

When you’re changing code, take some time to look for and understand the patterns that might be in place, and decide whether it is worth preserving (or restoring) them: whether doing this will really make the code better and more understandable.

Browser Link in VS 2013
In order to make this feature work, ensure that we have configured:

<appSettings>
  <add key="vs:EnableBrowserLink" value="true" />
</appSettings>
...
<compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.5.1" />
...
<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
...

Five Patterns to Help You Tame Asynchronous JavaScript

Callbacks
Observer Pattern
Messaging
Promises
Finite State Machines

Daily Reading - Monday, July 01 2013

2013-07-01T00:00:00+07:00

Economics of AWS

Mastering CSS layout with Flexbox

Cool features of Visual Studio 2013

2013-07-01T00:00:00+07:00

Microsoft has released preview version of Visual Studio 2013 at BUILD. This version is just a year from Visual Studio 2012, but it has some new cool features.

Map mode in Scrollbar

Map of code on scrollbar. Hover over it to review, it's easy to view your code before jumping to that code.

Enable code map.

Code Lens

Above classes, methods there is a small text show where they are referenced.

Without looking at Test Explorer we can know test methods passed or not

Peek Definition

Put cursor in BooksContext, press Alt F12, it shows a definition window in the current window. It's very useful to review our code without opening files. In this small window we have code map, line number, promote to normal window if we want.

Auto brace completion

When you type open braces [, (, it will add a close braces ], ) automatically. This is a small enhancement, but it is very useful.

Browser Link

This is a great feature for web developer. Press Ctrl F5 to launch your web, edit HTML, CSS, then press Ctrl Alt Enter browser will refresh automatically.

Notification

All extension, product, project updates are in a central place.

Inline Navigate

Press Ctrl , now it shows a small text box on the top left instead of a central window in VS2012.

Native git support without extension

Beside these cool features, Visual Studio 2013 also enhance performance, icon color... It ships new .NET 4.5.1, ASP.NET MVC 5 and WEB API 2.

Daily Reading - Sunday, June 30 2013

2013-06-30T00:00:00+07:00

Initial Web MIDI support in Chrome Canary!

Telemetry Basics and Troubleshooting

Daily Reading - Saturday, June 29 2013

2013-06-29T00:00:00+07:00

Announcing TypeScript 0.9.0.1

Skype team shares its mobile plans for the road ahead

Visual C++ will implement all of C++ 11 and C++ 14

SQL 2014 CTP1, where is my BIDS?

An Interview with jQuery Legend Rey Bango

PhoneGap 2.9.0 released

Daily Reading - Friday, June 28 2013

2013-06-28T00:00:00+07:00

Announcing a pre-release of F# 3.1

Announcing the General Availability of Windows Azure Mobile Services, Web Sites and continued Service innovation

Designing the Visual Studio 2013 User Experience
Icons get more color, now it's easier to look at.

HTML Editing Features in Visual Studio 2013 Preview
Brand new HTML Editor for Razor files (.cshtml, .vbhtml) improve smart indent and format, automactic brace completion and type-through, intellisense item grouping

Overview and Recommendations for Distributed File Systems
An overview of DFS technologies: NFS, CIFS, OwFS, HDFS ...

Paul Graham: Some VCs Push For Large Rounds, Even When Startups Don't Need Them

Venture capitalists are getting smaller stakes in startups and that trend will increasingly continue. Venture investors are used to taking a 20% stake in Series A fundings. But that number is arbitrary and will inevitably go down further.

Today, VCs often push for larger first round financings even when they know the company doesn’t need it. Why? To make up for the “opportunity cost of taking a board seat,” Graham says.

Valuation vs Ownership

21 Months In: How to Manage a Remote Team

The Startup Sector That’s Quietly Booming

7 Months with TypeScript

TypeScript has been a joy to work with over the past 7 months. Having had experience with types/interfaces in ActionScript/ES4, I took to TypeScript very rapidly as it supported the structure I needed, yet maintained the elegant flexibility of JavaScript. In many ways I know our choice in using the compiler really moved our project forward in both delivery date and in code quality. I cannot say I have ever been a Microsoft fan but TypeScript has ‘softened’ me, it is easily one of the best web technologies to arrive in the past 3 years. I am looking forward to working on more projects with it and evolving with the language/compiler ongoing.

Daily Reading - Thursday, June 27 2013

2013-06-27T00:00:00+07:00

Visual Studio 2013 Preview
Cool new features:

Energy Consumption tool: estimate how much power their app will cause the device to consume
View method return values in the debugger
“Edit and Continue” for 64-bit
Code Information Indicators
Peek Definition

Introducing IE11
IE11 now supports WebGL, latest video tag, brand new F12 tool and optimize touch performance.

Autoscaling Windows Azure Application
In the past, we had to use WASABi to scale our applications manually, now Windows Azure released autoscale feature for:

Cloud Services
Virtual Machines
Web Sites

Currently, they support 2 metrics - CPU percentage - Storage queue depth

A few more Visual Studio 2013 Preview features

New dimension for Windows: Microsoft puts 3D printing support directly into OS

Daily Reading - Tuesday, June 26 2013

2013-06-26T00:00:00+07:00

What’s new in IIS 8.5

How To Get Advice From Powerful People

First of all, don’t be afraid to make initial contact
Whether you read a blog post and hesitate at emailing the writer, or you’re at a conference and are too nervous to talk to a speaker….you’re making a big mistake!

Specificity is king

Follow up
Follow up twice, every 48 hours. Some people are afraid to follow up because they don’t want to be annoying. The truth is that by following up, you’re being less annoying because you prevent me from feeling bad about forgetting to respond to your initial email. The follow up should be short and ask the question you initially wanted answered without mentioning the person didn’t respond to your previous email

Google Consumer surveys
Add realtime surveys to your website

Visual Studio 2013 and ASP.NET Preview
New cool feature Browserlink, there is no need for LiveReload.

Rails 4.0: Final version released!

Daily Reading - Tuesday, June 25 2013

2013-06-25T00:00:00+07:00

5 Tips to Improve Performance of C# Code

Realtime Analytics with Cassandra, Spark

Creating a fast and mobile-friendly website with Jekyll

Content-first design ain’t herding cats

Daily Reading - Monday, June 24 2013

2013-06-24T00:00:00+07:00

iSecure and iWallet patents

Do you really read?

I challenge myself to answer the following questions in everything I read:

Has this taught me anything new and valuable? (If not, move on quickly)

How can I apply insights from this article today? (Wait and I’ll forget)

When have I applied the ideas from this post? Where have I not, but could have? (What was the difference?)

Why Hiring Seasoned Sales Reps May Not Work

One of the biggest mistakes early-stage startups making is hiring 'seasoned' sales professionals too early.

Effective Technical Leadership

Most successful projects have a single engineer responsible for driving the project forward while ensuring that strong technical decisions are made with confidence. Typically, that person is referred to as a Tech Lead. They often don’t manage people, but instead coach them to do their best work.

Using Promises in AngularJS Views

iOS App Icon Template

Instagram’s pivot into complexity

Instagram’s core strength relied on a similar principle. It was just photos you could scroll through. Nothing more, nothing less. You could open Instagram for 10 seconds and check what’s new, or for 10 minutes and get lost in the universe of people’s lives. And you always knew what you were going to get: an endless stream of photos. Just keep scrolling.

Now there’s no way to tell if you’re going to see a photo or a video. When you do happen upon a video, you have to stop scrolling and wait for it to load. And if you happen to check Instagram during a meeting and forget to turn the sound off… well, awkward.

that it’s just the latest example of our obsession to add as many features as possible to products out of fear of losing traction. Instead of lateral shifts into additional functionality, I’d like to see more companies double down on the features they already have, and continuously improve the experience around those features.

Daily Reading - Saturday, June 23 2013

2013-06-23T00:00:00+07:00

5 little design decisions to admire

Snapchat’s single button for taking photo + video
Tap to snap. Hold to capture video.It’s intuitive because the thing you want to capture is the same in both instances; what’s different is how long you want to capture it for

Candy Crush Saga’s “5 more moves.”
Couldn’t finish the puzzle in the allotted number of moves, buy for more 5 moves.

Path’s sticker store
The sticker packs are displayed oh-so-prettily on neat little shelves, complete with dramatic spotlight as if this were a museum exhibit of sorts. Tilt the phone, and the stickers swing along, playfully reacting to your movements.

Spotify’s “Popular” section
For one thing, the discrepancy between the order of the songs and the global plays gives you an indication of what’s popular recently vs. what’s been popular historically, useful if you’re new to an artist. You also get a sense for the difference in popularity between various songs, something a simple sorted list doesn’t give you, so you can tell if the artist is a one-hit wonder or a consistent chart-topper

Evernote’s note cards
I’m talking about those little squares that look like white Post-It notes that show you a preview of the note’s content. There’s something about the tangibility and physicality of that design that makes it work so much better for me than a list.

Patterns for REST API bulk operations

A collection of best front end frameworks for faster&easier web development

Evolutionary Architecture: Stop Divining Your Architecture, Instead Evolve It

Shift architectural focus to the things that will result in an Evolutionary Architecture, one capable of evolving with the business.It means don't spend a lot of time trying to divine the perfect architecture upfront

Daily Reading - Friday, June 21 2013

2013-06-21T00:00:00+07:00

State of DevOps in 2013

The benefits of reverse proxy
A reverse proxy is server component that sites between the internet and your web servers. It accepts http requests, provide various services and forward the requests to one or many servers.
Here are some benefits:

Load balancing: route HTTP request to identical servers.
Security: hide your web servers behind DMZ
Authentication: single point of authentication for all HTTP requests
SSL Termination: handle HTTPS requests.
Serve static content
Caching: HTTP caching
Compression
Centralised Logging and Auditing
URL Rewriting
Aggregating multiple websites

Big Web App? Compile it

NPM what next
Some features on NPM roadmap:

Multiple registries
CDN-delivered static assets
Source code searching and analytics
Addressable content
Signed packages

Practical lessons from RubyNation 2013

Daily Reading - Thursday, June 20 2013

2013-06-20T00:00:00+07:00

Netflix Ice

Ice provides a birds-eye view of our large and complex cloud landscape from a usage and cost perspective.

Ice help us view our accouts, services, cost and usage,...

Use of Flat Design in Mobile App Interfaces, Best Examples

Flat style is famous for its ability of adding extra flair of sophistication, elegance and neatness to any app interface, making it look more spacious and organized. As a rule, plain graphics and common icons skillfully interact with vivid color scheme, recreating flamboyant touches. Simplicity, absence of styles and effects give the design, at the same time, uncomplicated, and slightly intricate appearance.

Big data in Practice wiht Cassandra

Most A/B test will fail
A/B test lessons form Jitbit

Most of your tests will fail. It’s sad, but it’s okay.

Testing insignificant changes is time wasting.

Don’t run tests on pages that have a small number of visitors.

Don’t finish your tests before you have a statistically significant result. Use this handy calculator.

Don’t ever rely on intuition. Test results are unpredictable.

Bill Spingarn comments:

However, beyond that I'd just like to point out that ultimately testing is just studying what happens when variables change in a controlled manner. Even if your last ten tests fail, it should not be all for nothing. I can't stress enough that with each test you should be adding to your body of knowledge about your site/product by taking time to understand the WHY behind a failed test. Split testing is not a magic bullet, but inch by inch you will see results if you employ the tool in a pragmatic approach.

Some tips for freelancers

Future of BigData, the next Hadoop

Spark can store data in the memory subsystems of the thousand of servers it pulls together. Hadoop stores its data on good old fashioned hard disks, and grabbing data from memory requires far less time.

Hadoop often is used in tandem with Storm and distributed engines such as Hive, which let you slice and dice data via the SQL query language. But Spark is designed to mimic these tools directly, offering myriad possibilities from the same piece of software. Tools called Shark (analogous to Hive) to Spark Streaming (analogous to Storm) already run atop the platform.

Machine learning algorithms involve crunching and re-crunching the same data — over and over again — in what’s called a “logistic regression.” With Hadoop, this can be particularly time-consuming because you have to visit the hard disk with each iteration of the algorithm. But with Spark, you can iterate in memory.

Daily Reading - Wednesday, June 19 2013

2013-06-19T00:00:00+07:00

TypeScript 0.9 Preview Release
This release provide some new features: Generics, Overloading on Constants, Export =, Enums. The new compiler improves performance, reliably, enhance completion, type information, error report.

There’s no such thing as Declarative and Imperative

Every Declarative is a chunking-up of something else, and every Imperative is a chunking-down, and you can chunk up and down to different levels of abstraction

Even Java is a more declarative form of bytecode, and bytecode is a more declarative form of machine language.

The Myth of “What” and “How”

The code is how we deliver a story.
The story is how we deliver a feature.
The feature is how we give the users the capability to do something.
The users’ capabilities are how they deliver a business goal.

It doesn’t really matter much whether we call them features, stories or tasks, as long we appreciate that they’re how we’re delivering to those higher-level whats

Scaling Mailbox
Some useful lessons of Mailbox from Sean Beausolie

Keep number of technologies to a minimum. They didn't want to become expert on a lot of different systems, they wanted to focus on the development of their product.
Pay attention to what users do. Core infrastructure was tweaked, sharded, or removed in response to user usage patterns.

LINQ Extensions Library 1.0.4.2
New LINQ Extensions Library release provide custom sort feature.

Log Parser Studio v2

Top 10 Frontend framework 2
A glimpse of Foundation, GroundworkCSS, Gumby, IVORY,..

10 performance tips from LinkedIn Mobile

Daily Reading - Tuesday, June 18 2013

2013-06-18T00:00:00+07:00

Digg Reader is released in June 26

Hotel vs Airbnb price comparison

We discovered that Airbnb apartment rentals cost 21.2% less than staying at a hotel. And if you’re on a budget, you can save 49.5% if you decide to stay in a private room at a host’s house instead of staying in a hotel.

Emails marketing tips
The author shares his experiences of email marketing

Facebook, Heroku, Github PSD
Free homepages of Facebook, Heroku, Github PSD for education purpose.

Where to put unit tests

You should put unit tests in a separate library to give clearer seperation of concern, reduce production code, enhance API design feedback

Logging: The Most Important Part of Any Application

Daily Reading - Monday, June 17 2013

2013-06-17T00:00:00+07:00

Startup geography
A look at where startups are located.

Build ribbit in meteor
A good introduction tutorial of meteor.

Scala.JS
Write javascript in Scala syntax.

Bootstrap related frameworks

Google’s Dead-Simple Tool For Making UX Decisions: 2 Jars Of Marbles

Daily Reading - Sunday, June 16 2013

2013-06-16T00:00:00+07:00

Outsourcing and Limiting to Core Competencies are Essential

The leanest companies will identify as few core competencies as possible, and outsource everything else. Instagram’s initial core competencies were (a) software development of image filters, (b) iPhone photo-sharing application development, and (c) driving adoption. 14 employees can handle that. When you throw in the other things I listed above, they’d need at least double the staff—so they outsourced, for example, to Amazon Web Services (server + network administration).

85% of all developer time must be spent on business-specific logic

Daily Reading - Saturday, June 15 2013

2013-06-15T00:00:00+07:00

What's Wrong with the iOS 7 Icons?
Poor choice of color, inconsistent language, weak use of metaphor are comments of iOS 7 icons on HackerNews

Release more with less
The author provides some evidences why we should release small changes more frequenly. It will improve cycle time, flow, feedback, risk, overheads, efficiency, ownership.

Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise will be social, mobile, cloud and big data.

Wormhole pub/sub system: Moving data through space and time
It's Facebook's pub/sub system that delivers 1 trillion messages per day. It look like delivery service than message service.

Foursquare's geographic stack
It replies on open sources: PostGIS, GDAL, Shapely, Fiona, QGIS, S2, and JTS. It also relies on open geographic data: OSM, geonames.org, US Census’ TIGER, Canada’s geogratis, Mexico’s INEGI and EuroGeoGraphics

Decoupled CMS
Decoupled CMS is a movement that remove monolithic stacks. It improves collaboration, scalability, flexibility for CMS. It separate the whole stack into 3 independent components: Web Editing tool, Web Framework, and Content Repository. So that we can use SQL Server, CouchDB, MongoDB for repository and Web Framework like Rails, Django, PHP,..

Monitoring Single Page App
Monitoring on the server is not enough. We should monitoring feature load, page load and unresponsiveness on the client. We can use Google Analytics to do that.

SQL Server 2014 Hekaton White paper
It's good read to know how Hekaton store data in memory.

The Most Effective Price Discovery Question for Your Startup

A look into SQL Server In-Memory Hekaton engine

2013-06-15T00:00:00+07:00

Hekaton is a new in-memory OLTP database engine in SQL Server 2014. It's inside SQL Server, so it does not require a separate hardware, or seperate database.

Previous SQL Server stores data on disk, only load data to memory when needed to processing. In Hekaton everything is in memory, it does not need to load data from disk. It also has new HASH INDEX structure, compiled stored procedures. So it's extremely fast.

Hekaton's design goals:

fitting most or all of data required by a workload into main-memory
lower latency time for data operations
specialized database engines that specific types of workloads need to be tuned just for those workloads

In-Memory OLTP removes the issues of waiting locks to be released using a completely new type of multi-version optimistic concurrency control.

Memory optimized table

It is no need to read from disk. A set of checkpoint files are used for recovery that keep track the changes of data. Transaction log is stored on disk, the same as disk-based tables. If server crash, the rows of data can be created from checkpoint files and transaction logs.

Non-durable table (SCHEMA_ONLY) is only available on memory. It does not require any IO operations, so data will be lost when server shutdown. But it's useful for temp data, caches, web server sessions.

Rows

Rows are allocated from structures called heaps. Rows for a single table are not necessarily stored near other rows from the same table and the only way SQL Server knows what rows belong to the same table is because they are all connected using the tables’ indexes.

Each row consists of a header and a payload containing the row attributes.

Indexes on memory-optimized tables: Hash index

They are not stored as traditional B-trees. Memory-optimized tables are never stored as unorganized sets of rows, like a disk-based table heap is stored.
Indexes are never stored on disk, operation are not logged. When SQL Server restart, indexes will be rebuilt.

Hash index is an array of hash bucket that is a pointer.
In the example below, hash function is the length of name, city column. The row with name "Greg" whose length is 4, the hash bucket with value 4 will pointer to this row. Another rows with the same value is linked into the same chain

A pointer is 2 bytes in row header that follows IdxLinkCount.

Native compiled stored procedures

Hekaton translates it to C and then compile it to a DLL. So it does not need compile at run time. Performance improves 10X to 25X time.

Interpreted TSQL

We can access full TSQL but performance is not good as native compiled stored procedures.

Transaction Isolation levels

The following isolation levels are supported for transactions accessing memory-optimized tables

Snapshot
Repeatable Read
Serializable

Validation

Prior to the final commit of transactions involving memory-optimized tables, SQL Server performs a validation step. Because no locks are acquired during data modifications, it is possible that the data changes could result in invalid data based on the requested isolation level

Create database

Add MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA filegroups for checkpoint files.

CREATE DATABASE HKDB
ON 
PRIMARY(NAME = [HKDB_data],
FILENAME = 'Q:\data\HKDB_data.mdf', size=500MB),
FILEGROUP [SampleDB_mod_fg] CONTAINS MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA
(NAME = [HKDB_mod_dir], FILENAME = 'R:\data\HKDB_mod_dir'),
(NAME = [HKDB_mod_dir], FILENAME = 'S:\data\HKDB_mod_dir')
LOG ON (name = [SampleDB_log], Filename='L:\log\HKDB_log.ldf', size=500MB)
COLLATE Latin1_General_100_BIN2;

Create tables

Hekaton support all datatypes except LOB, all rows will be limited to 8060 bytes. Add MEMORY_OPTIMIZED and DURABILITY hints to the create statement.

CREATE TABLE T1
(
[Name] varchar(32) not null PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED HASH WITH (BUCKET_COUNT = 1024),
[City] varchar(32) null,
[LastModified] datetime not null,
) WITH (MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON, DURABILITY = SCHEMA_AND_DATA)

Limitation:
- No DML triggers - No FOREIGN KEY or CHECK constraints - No IDENTITY columns - No UNIQUE indexes other than for the PRIMARY KEY - A maximum of 8 indexes, including the index supporting the PRIMARY KE - No Schema changes, No DDL command(CREATE INDEX, ALTER INDEX,...)

Hekaton is very fast database, so it is good to store session data, user profiles, or cached data.

Daily Reading Friday, June 14 2013

2013-06-14T00:00:00+07:00

Devtoolsecrets

A collection of tips & tricks about web debugging

Debug frame rate for better performance

Atoic Web Design

Atomic is an approach in web design, it divides into five distinct levels: atom, molecule, organism, template, page. It's not new, but it defines a clear way of thinking that supports team members, client for better communication, easily traverse from abstract to concrete

Jasmine Setup

2013-05-29T00:00:00+07:00

The first time using Jasmine. This is step by step example:

Download the latest version
Delete files in /src and /spec
Add source files to /src: HelloWorld.js

function helloWorld() {
    return "Hello World!";
}

Add test files to /spec: HelloWorldSpec.js

describe("Hello world", function() {
    it("says hello", function() {
        expect(helloWorld()).toEqual("Hello world!");
    });
});

Edit file SpecRunner.html: include source and spec files in include source files here and include spec files here
Run the SpecRunner.html

Visit Jasmine home for more assert statements.

References:

Python Package Installation

2013-05-17T00:00:00+07:00

This is a short note how to install package from PyPi

Support Python 2.7

Install Setuptool

Download setuptools

If you run Windows 64bit, download and run python ez_setup.py. It will automatically install easytool.exe in Scripts folder

Install download package, run this command

python setup.py install

Install package by easy_install

Reference

Install package by name

easy_install SQLObject

Download a source, automatically build and install it

easy_install http://example.com/path/to/MyPackage-1.2.3.tgz

Install an already-downloaded .egg file

easy_install /my_downloads/OtherPackage-3.2.1-py2.3.egg

Upgrade installed package to latest version

easy_install --upgrade PyProtocols

Upgrade packages

Upgrade a specific version

easy_install "SomePackage==2.0"

Upgrade package that a version greater than

easy_install "SomePackage>2.0"

Upgrade to latest version on PyPi

easy_install --upgrade SomePackage

Uninstall packages

easy_install -mxN PackageName