Blogs on juri.dev

The React CLI you always wanted but didn’t know about

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 07:40:00 +0100

In this article, I’d like to specifically talk about developer tooling, why it is so massively important and how you might have missed out on Nx as your main React CLI for kickstarting new awesome projects.

Shifting my role at Nrwl

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 07:40:00 +0100

I’ve been a Nx user since the very beginning. It is crazy to think back now after so many years. The mission & direction always made sense to me. You can imagine I got quite excited when I had this in my inbox.

Publishing a Next.js app to Vercel with Nx

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 07:40:00 +0100

During this journey from setting up our Next.js app within an Nx workspace, to configuring Tailwind, Markdown rendering, Storybook and Cypress we’re now at the point where we should look at the deployment of our site. Let’s learn how to deploy to some static environment as well as leverage the rich features when deploying to Vercel.

Use Cypress with Next.js and Nx to battle test your React Components

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 07:40:00 +0100

In the previous article, we talked about how Nx comes with first-class support for setting up Storybook. Nx also automatically generates Cypress e2e tests for the various Storybook stories, which is exactly what we’re going to explore in this article.

Use Storybook with Tailwind in an Nx Workspace

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 07:40:00 +0100

In the previous article, we talked about Nx workspace generators and how they can help be more efficient in automating repetitive tasks. In this article, we’re going to leverage Nx’s excellent support for Storybook to develop our components in isolation before using them in our Next.js app.

Using Nx Workspace generators to scaffold new blog posts

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 08:40:00 +0100

In the previous article we talked about how to leverage Nx capabilities to create a custom Next server that allows us to perform a fast refresh not only when our React components change, but also whenever we change something in our MDX files. This is especially interesting as we’re writing a new article and want to see the changes live immediately in our browser. This week we’ll continue by looking at how to leverage Nx Workspace generators to scaffold new blog drafts.

Hot Reload MDX changes in Next.js and Nx

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 08:40:00 +0100

In the previous article we learned how to use next-mdx-remote to load and hydrate MDX content. In this article, we’re going to learn how to implement a custom server for our Next.js app with Nx, that allows us to auto-refresh the rendering whenever something in our MDX files changes.

Component hydration with MDX in Next.js and Nx

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 08:40:00 +0100

In the previous article, we explored how to render Markdown with Next.js as well as how Nx can help by moving the markdown-related processing logic into its own library. In this article, we’re going to explore how to dynamically hydrate React components with MDX and Next.js.

Read and render MD files with Next.js and Nx

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:40:00 +0100

In the previous article, we looked into how to setup Tailwind with Next.js and Nx workspace. In this article we are going to learn how to use Next.js to read files from the file system, to parse the Markdown, and to render it to HTML. In particular, we’re going to see how Nx helps us generate code and organize the features into Nx libraries. Rendering Markdown files is an essential part of creating a JAMStack application. For our blog platform, we are going to write articles in Markdown, which should then be parsed and rendered properly.

Setup Next.js to use Tailwind with Nx

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 08:40:00 +0100

In the previous article we learned how to setup Next.js in an Nx workspace. In this article we carry that forward, by adding TailwindCSS support to our setup.

Create a Next.js web app with Nx

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 08:40:00 +0100

In this article, we’re going to explore how to create our very first web application with Next.js and Nx. We’re going to learn about the anatomy of a Nx based workspace, how to generate one, and specifically how to setup our Next.js application. Finally, we’re also going to create our blog’s about page and learn about some handy Next.js features.

Angular Services, providedIn and Lazy Modules

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 08:40:00 +0100

I often see people confused about how the DI works, in particular with lazy loaded modules. In this article we’re going to explore some dependency injection particularities with Angular, specifically in combination with lazy loaded modules.

SoloCoder Podcast: About Coding and Martial Arts

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 19:07:14 +0200

I recently had the pleasure to be on the SoloCoder podcast hosted by Aderson Oliveira.

How Remote Work Improved My Sleep

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 17:39:49 +0100

Today a less tech focused article. Rather let’s talk about sleep and it’s importance for us software developers to stay focused and remain performant during the day.

Common Chunk and Lazy Loading in Angular

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 15:00:00 +0100

Since I get this question often, why not write it down! What we’re going to look at in this article is lazy loading in Angular, but in specific about the “common chunk” and the “commonChunk” option in the Angular builder configuration.

Automatic Multi-Step Code Migrations with Nx

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0100

Apart from the framework itself, one outcome from Google’s Angular team is for sure the tooling. One important tooling feature is the ability to automatically upgrade Angular codebases across breaking changes. Let’s see how that works and why it is important.

Scale React Development with Nx

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:40:00 +0100

I’m happy to announce the release of my latest Egghead course on “Scale React development with Nx”. Let me briefly dive into what the course is about, why I targeted it to React.js developers and who should watch it!

I'm new to Nx. Where do I get started?

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 20:49:05 +0100

If you are new to Nx, but curious, here are a couple of pointers and links where and how to get started.

Access Selenium Test Screenshots on failed GitLab Pipeline Steps

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:25:12 +0200

You know those moments when your Selenium based test succeeds locally, but for some weird reason fails on CI? The only hope: screenshots of the failed run! Let’s quickly have a look at how we can tell GitLab to store those screenshots on a failed run.

Using the Nx Dependency Graph in Custom Scripts

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 11:09:52 +0200

One of the powerful pillars of the open-source Nx monorepo toolkit is its dependency graph. In this article, we’re going to look into how we can leverage it in our own scripts.

Access Angular Material's MatSelect Options Panel Container

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 10:47:22 +0200

In this article we’re going to explore how you can programmatically access the Angular Material Select panel, without doing strange global DOM queries . Let’s dive in!

Detect when node_modules are out of sync

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 02:19:00 +0200

I’m pretty sure this already happened to you as well. You pull down the latest main branch or jump to some feature branch and you start getting weird errors. Until only later you recognize you forgot to execute an npm install. Let’s look into how we can avoid that.

Partial Commits in WebStorm

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 21:29:00 +0200

I think partial commits should be avoided as they might lead to inconsistent commits if you don’t test them properly. But sometimes they’re handy too. In this article I’m quickly showing how partial commits can be done in Webstorm.

AskJuri: Learning about Angular Elements

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 17:13:18 +0200

About questions I’m getting asked online, on Twitter, in person…wherever and which I find useful to share with the general public

Create Nx Libs with Assets

Thu, 21 May 2020 00:01:04 +0200

One of the core pieces of Nx are libraries. They enable to seamlessly share functionality across various apps and other libs within the monorepository. Exporting code is easy, but how can we export things like assets?

Debug Jest with VSCode

Thu, 14 May 2020 14:54:27 +0200

Jest has become the goto testing framework in the frontend space, whether it is for React or for Angular. In Nx it is even the default choice when generating a new Angular app. Debugging can be a bit more cumbersome though, in contrast to Karma. Let’s see.

Joining Nrwl 🐳 🦄

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 10:20:14 +0100

Alright, so yes, I joined Nrwl 😍!! The title should rather be: 5 weeks at Nrwl 🙂 as this week I’m starting my 6th one. Hugely delayed blog post, but hey time at Nrwl flies like mad! So here we go with the entire story.

Git Rebase vs Merge

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 22:17:17 +0100

Git is an “old” technology if you want that has been around for ages now. Still, when speaking or collaborating with other software developers, I always again see them struggle with apparently basic commands. But it doesn’t have to be scary. In this article I’m going to quickly walk you through the difference between “merge” and “rebase”.

Talk: Lazy Loading on Steroids with Angular Elements

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 08:48:08 +0100

Last week I was invited to jsbe.io, a JS meetup in Bruxelles (Belgium) to talk about lazy loading in Angular in combination with Angular Elements. Here is the recording and slides of my talk.

Talk: Enterprise Grade Angular Reactive Forms

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 08:48:08 +0100

This year I again had the pleasure to come back to ng-be as a speaker. Since I see a lot of people struggle with creating proper forms, especially large forms, I gave a talk about how to optimize your Angular Reactive Forms with the help of ngx-formly.

Lazy Loading with Angular Elements and ngx-lazy-el

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 12:00:28 +0100

Modern web apps often suffer of bad startup time. This frustrates your users. Even worse (especially for public facing apps), it might even result in being penalized on the Google search index.

Manually Lazy Load an Angular Module with ViewEngine and Ivy

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:09:59 +0200

I have written about lazy loading components in the past, that covers some of the topics mentioned here as well. Today in this post I’d like to exclusively focus on how to approach lazy loading of an Angular Module in a way that is compatible with ViewEngine and Ivy.

Debugging Angular Ivy Applications from the Devtools Console

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 22:44:36 +0200

Do you remember how in AngularJS (v1.x) we could easily debug/change the state of our components from the browser’s devtools. Guess what: now with Ivy a new easy API returns that openes up a variety of new ways. Let’s see how that works.

Resume your Work with Git

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 22:27:34 +0200

Git is an essential tool for every software developer and something you should know well in order to keep your productivity high. Knowing all about git is quite impossible 😃, but there are some basic workflows which will dramatically improve your devlife. Today let’s take a look at how to resume your work after the weekend.

Angular Performance: Precaching with the Service Worker

Sat, 31 Aug 2019 12:45:59 +0200

This article is part of my “Angular Performance Week” series, where I publish a new video each day based on the performance articles on web.dev/angular. Today we’re diving into the service worker API, in specific by leveraging Angular’s integrated service worker package.

Angular Performance: Virtual Scrolling with the CDK

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 12:45:59 +0200

This article is part of my “Angular Performance Week” series, where I publish a new video each day based on the performance articles on web.dev/angular.

Angular Performance: Optimize Angular Change Detection

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 12:45:59 +0200

This article is part of my “Angular Performance Week” series, where I publish a new video each day based on the performance articles on web.dev/angular. Angular is fast, but we can make it even faster. One way is by tuning its change detection system. Let’s see how.

Angular Performance: Performance budgets with the Angular CLI

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 12:45:59 +0200

This article is part of my “Angular Performance Week” series, where I publish a new video each day based on the performance articles on web.dev/angular. This article focuses on how we can define performance budgets with the Angular CLI.

Angular Performance: Preloading Lazy Routes

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 12:45:59 +0200

This article is part of my “Angular Performance Week” series, where I publish a new video each day based on the performance articles on web.dev/angular. Today we’re going to have a look at various ways to preload lazy routes in Angular: preloading all modules, custom preloading and with ngx-quicklink.

Angular Performance: Route Level Code Splitting

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 12:45:59 +0200

This article is part of my “Angular Performance Week” series, where I publish a new video each day based on the performance articles on web.dev/angular. Today we’re taking a look at route-level code splitting to increase the TTI of our application.

Dynamically Load CSS with the Angular CLI

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 12:42:15 +0200

I’ve written about lazy loading in the past, as well as how to handle various styling issues in Angular. This time we’ll explore how to customize the Angular CLI s.t. we can lazy load CSS files on the fly.

It’s time to say thank you to the Angular CLI Team!

Tue, 13 Aug 2019 11:37:24 +0200

Nowadays, you can create, and run a new Angular project in minutes (!! 🔥). It really just depends how fast your internet is to download all the node_modules. This wasn’t always the case in the Angular community but many forgot about it!

Publish a Docker container from Bitbucket to Google Cloud Container Registry

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 14:55:26 +0200

Automation is key, I cannot repeat that often enough. In this article we’re going to explore how to setup and configure your Bitbucket pipeline, to automate the pushing of your Docker containers to the Google Cloud Container Registry.

Challenging the Testing Pyramid

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0200

Writing automated tests has become like a standard practice in software development and (should be) an integral part of a healthy software development process. Testing (in particular automated testing) can come with different flavors and at different levels. In this article I’d like to provide a quick overview of automated UI or end-2-end testing with Cypress.

Update to Angular Version 8 now!

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 12:00:00 +0200

Let’s dive into the latest Angular version 8 that just got released. We’ll quickly explore what’s new, why you should update, how that works and what you should watch out for.

Create Code Snippets for Visual Studio Code with ease

Thu, 23 May 2019 12:00:00 +0200

When writing software, even when writing a blog post using Markdown, there are some pieces you have to write again and again. Either you’re lazy or you don’t remember the exact syntax, code snippets can really help here. Let’s see how.

Angular 8 and the Future - NGConf 2019 Roundup

Wed, 01 May 2019 17:30:08 +0200

I’m not at NGConf 2019 (unfortunately). But I’m following along very closely with the Angular community (and as an Angular GDE) I’m particularly excited what’s currently being announced at Salt Lake City . As such I’m summarizing here my main takeaway from the conf.

Lazy load Angular Components

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 14:00:00 +0100

Lazy loading is hot recently and for a good reason. It’s all about speed! The Chrome team at Google in specific (around Addy Osmani) tries to push out content (and new APIs) to optimize the heck out of web pages.

Introduction to Angular Elements

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 12:00:09 +0200

You didn’t yet get into Angular Elements? Then it’s time to give it a go! In this article we’re going to see what Angular Elements actually are, why they are useful and how to create our first Angular Element out of a plain component.

Setup your Workstation for JavaScript Development

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 16:10:05 +0200

You want to learn about modern web development with JavaScript? Maybe Angular? Well, then it’s time to get you setup properly to get started. In this article we’ll go through some of the tools.

Productive Git for Developers

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 10:00:00 +0100

With this Egghead course, I aim at a different goal. You will walk through a series of scenarios which you’ll most commonly encounter in your daily work life as a developer.

RxJS finalize operator to execute logic on Observable termination

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 10:00:00 +0100

In this article we’re going to have a look at the RxJS finalize operator. To have a practical use case, let’s take a look at disabling/enabling a form submit button during an HTTP request.

A step-by-step guide to integrating a third party widget with Angular

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 21:24:36 +0100

When working on a complex project you will inevitably face the situation when you have to use a 3rd party widget in your project. Also, most of the web projects today use frameworks.

Display Server Side Validation Errors with Angular

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 20:30:31 +0100

Input Validation is a big topic when it comes to forms. And even more in those large, enterprisey apps, where validation can become really crazy. Now, Angular forms of course provide different mechanisms for handling validation out of the box. However, in this article I won’t go into those details, I will rather show you a possible strategy for visualizing server side validation errors.

Explore Angular Router's runGuardsAndResolvers

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 18:39:51 +0100

Learn how we can use new options introduced for the runGuardsAndResolvers setting for the Angular Router configuration to get a better control over when to run our resolvers and guards.

Guarantee Event Order with RxJS

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 15:03:22 +0100

When you create dynamic UIs, you have to deal with async stuff a lot. Most often they are triggered by some user interaction. Things usually get tricky when you need to guarantee certain operations are executed in order. Since they are async we might not know which one returns first. Let's see how RxJS can help a lot here.

It's not just Standing Up

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 10:53:38 +0100

I’m highly convinced that the hardest part of software development is people. Here are some of my notes of the awesome article from Jason Yip on “It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings”.

Learn Angular Router for Real-World Applications

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Finally, it's out!!! My Angular router course is now available on Egghead, go grab it :)

Better Redirects in Angular Route Guards

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Angular version 7.1 not only comes with bugfixes but includes also a bunch of new features. In this post I’d like to particularly take a look at the optimizations added to route guards.

Egghead Lesson: Simple caching with RxJS

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 01:00:00 +0000

This is the accompanying article for my latest Egghead video lesson on caching data in Angular by leveraging RxjS. (adsbygoogle = window.

Egghead Lesson: Avoid memory leaks when subscribing to RxJS Observables in Angular Components

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 01:00:00 +0000

RxJS is a first class citizen in every Angular application. It's extremely powerful, but there are also some things you should know and be aware of when using it.

Simple State Management with RxJS’s scan operator

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

State management is a big topic currently in frontend development. For a reason: frontend frameworks/libraries got extremely powerful in the recent years, which led to more and more complex applications which need to be tamed.

My Journey replacing Promises with RxJS

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’m going to tell you, step-by-step, how I used RxJS to refactor a method that was based on Promises. (adsbygoogle = window.

[object ErrorEvent] thrown by Karma in Angular Unit Tests

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pretty sure when you’ve already come across this exception: `[object ErrorEvent] thrown` when you execute your Karma tests in an Angular project. Not very helpful, right?

In-depth: How do CDK Portals work?

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the last article we were exploring how to leverage the Angular Material CDK portals for placing some piece of template from a component to some other location within our app.

Dynamic UI with CDK TemplatePortal and DomPortalHost

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Ever wanted to place some piece of UI dynamically from one component to another? But the component that owns the content doesn't have any connection to the component that should display the content.

Extend the *ngIf Syntax to Create a Custom Permission Directive

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 01:00:00 +0000

So our use case is to create a directive, which shows/hides elements on the page based on our currently authenticated user's permissions. In this article we will go over a very simple use case, but which could easily be extended and used in a real production application.

Add Mocha reporter for Karma unit tests to your Angular CLI project

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Every Angular CLI generated project comes already with a test setup in place using Karma. I think the default "progress" test result report is not as nice however.

Create a CD pipeline with Angular, GitLab and Firebase

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 01:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge fan of automating all the stuff. Even if you’re a very precise and organized person, you’re likely to make mistakes. Be it because you do multiple things at the same time, you get distracted wherever.

Create a ng-true-value & ng-false-value directive for Angular

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 01:00:00 +0000

If you come from AngularJS (v1.x) I'm pretty sure you remember the `ng-true-value` and `ng-false-value` directive you could hook onto the checkbox elements in your forms.

Compile-time vs. Runtime configuration of your Angular App

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 01:00:00 +0000

When you develop a bigger application, chances are quite high that you need some kind of configuration. That can range from simply visualizing the app's version number to injecting custom themes etc.

Looking back on 2017

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 01:00:00 +0000

2017 has been a great year, lots of changes for me and new things 😅. Time for some retrospective. (Warning: this is not a tech blog post 😉) i love that people are tweeting lists of work they're proud of this year!

Three new Angular Courses to celebrate end of the Year 2017

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 01:00:00 +0000

2017 has been AMAAAAZING (more in a later post..maybe). So before the year ends let's celebrate it with some new Angular courses. I've just released 3 of them last week on egghead.

Use Dynamic Components to render HTML for 3rd party libraries

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 01:00:00 +0000

Dynamic components in Angular are very powerful and help you solve the trickiest problems. In this example we're going to learn how we can leverage dynamic Angular components to render the HTML of a popup controlled by a Leaflet map.

Demystifying dynamic Forms in Angular

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Heared about reactive Angular forms? Maybe even about dynamic forms? Never tried because you think it’s too complicated to setup and an overkill for your common use cases?

Understand How to Style Angular Components

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here it is!!! 🔥 🔥 🔥 My very first Egghead.io course 😃. Learn everything you need to know about styling Angular components. Contents are based on Angular version >=2 Last year I wrote an in depth article on how to conditionally style Angular components:

Intercept HTTP Requests in Angular

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Angular version 4.3.1 introduced one important new feature: the new HTTP client. Not only did it bring optimizations in how we can execute requests to backend APIs, but it made intercepting HTTP requests extremely easy.

Create a dynamic tab component with Angular

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this article is to learn about the concept of dynamic components and template references in Angular by building a dynamic tab component.

Enhanced ngIf and ngFor in Angular version 4.0.0

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ever wanted an "else" statement in *ngIf? It's finally here, together with some other nice improvements around dealing with Observables in templates. Let's explore them here.

Talks: Web meets Mobile powered by Angular

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

I had the pleasure to bring 3 amazing speakers on board for our Software Craftsmanship South Tyrol Meetup group which I'm organizing together with Christoph.

Tuning Angular's Change Detection

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

I recently prepared some course material for a modern web development workshop, which besides the nice features around ES6 obviously also included Angular. Change detection was part of that workshop and so I did some playing with it.

Angular Modules vs ES6 Modules

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

I often see people being confused when it comes to understanding Angular Modules vs. ES6 Modules. This happens especially for newcomers which enter the JavaScript and front-end development ecosystem and immediately get confronted with both of them.

Ted Talk: The Puzzle of Motivation

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 01:00:00 +0000

Nice talk about how many businesses get motivation wrong. Key points Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.

Video Course: Learning Angular Components

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 01:00:00 +0000

I just released the 2nd edition of my video course for PacktPub on "Learning Angular components". Contents are based on Angular version >=2 (adsbygoogle = window.

Talk: Testing with Angular - Some Recipes

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 01:00:00 +0000

I recently wanted to dive deeper into testing Angular applications, in specific on how to write proper unit tests for some common scenarious you might encounter.

Easy SSL support for your Jekyll Blog with CloudFlare

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 01:00:00 +0000

It's 2017 and if you didn't switch to a secure SSL connection yet, it's definitely time to do so. This has been on my todo list for a while already and now that I know how easy it was, I definitely should have done it before!

NG-BE Conf and the Angular Community <3

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 01:00:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to be part of the Belgium's first Angular conference: NG-BE conf. It was by far the best conference I've attended so far!

Interviewing Igor Minar and Adam Bradley for AngularBeers

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 01:00:00 +0000

For the last meetup of 2016, AngularBeers organized an AMA session with Igor Minar (lead dev of Angular at Google) and Adam Bradley (lead dev of Ionic).

Ok.. let me explain: it's going to be Angular 4.0, or simply Angular

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 01:00:00 +0000

At the 8th and 9th of December 2016 was NG-BE, Belgium’s first Angular conference. Igor Minar (Angular lead dev) attended as the keynote speaker with some interesting announcements regarding Angular’s release schedule.

Configure Ahead of Time (AoT) for your Angular app using the Angular CLI

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 01:00:00 +0000

In our previous video we learned how to use the Angular CLI to create our first Angular application. Now it's time to prepare it for production.

Safe Navigation Operator, RxJS and Async Pipe tinkering

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 01:00:00 +0000

RxJS? Safe Navigation operator? Async pipes? Not sure what I'm talking about? In this article I'd like to explore some cool combination of Http, RxJS and Async Pipes.

Custom validators in template driven Angular forms

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Angular version 2+ has two different kind of Forms API, the reactive and template driven approach. In this article we will focus on the template driven approach and learn how to use it as well as how to build a custom validator with it.

Data bind radio button lists with Angular

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Assume you have a simple list or table of elements, each row having a radio button. The user can select one of the rows and your task is to determine the selected row entry.

Configure a proxy for your API calls with Angular CLI

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 01:00:00 +0000

In this article (video included!) we will learn how to setup your Angular development server and how to configure it to properly communicate with your backend (REST) API.

Let's create your first Angular app

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Angular got released and so it's the perfect time to try it out. I totally understand it might be difficult to get started, but it doesn't have to.

Angular: Using the JSONPipe for debugging

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A powerful way of debugging, especially templates, in Angular 1 was the JSON pipe (or filter) which could be used within a template. The pipe still natively exists in Angular.

Angular: How do I get a reference to the window object?

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Remember the $window object in Angular 1? Turned out to be quite useful from now and then. But what about Angular? $window doesn't exist there.

Angular: How do I register an event listener on document?

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently got asked by an Angular community member on Twitter how one can register an event on the document object. While it is totally possible to directly access the document object and hook up some listener, it is not suggested.

Angular version 2.0.0 released!!

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It was at the ng-Europe, on the 22-23 September 2014 when the Angular team came with a huge surprise: "We're going to build Angular 2.

Angular Forms - a first look

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Angular gets a brand new Forms API. It's fresh out of the compiler and since there's not much documentation around yet, @angular_zone powered by Gerard Sans and Wassim Chegham organized a Google Hangout with Kara Erickson, core contributor to the Forms Api.

RxJS first steps - Subject and ReplaySubject

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I'm not sure you already heard about RxJS or Reactive Programming in general. There's currently a very strong movement towards such programming style in the modern JavaScript world, so you should definitely check it out.

From ng-controller to components with Angular 1.5

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The web has moved forward and so should you. Learn how to upgrade your Angular 1 app from a more MV* architecture to a cleaner, more component oriented approach.

Angular 2+ - A Getting Started Guide for Beginners

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Since about half a year, I'm organizing a local Meetup group around Software Craftsmanship. I recently also published a video course on "Learning Angular 2 directives"

Learning Angular 2 Directives

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Finally 😆, I managed to finish and publish my very first video course: "Learning Angular 2 Directives" by Packt Publishing. So relieved, and I even managed to publish it before the official RC1 😉.

Fine grained change detection with Angular

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today, while working on my Angular screencast series (announcement coming soon), I discovered a strange behavior when dealing with Angular change detection. Here's what I found.

Debugging Angular Applications from the Console

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 01:00:00 +0000

There have been some quite useful articles for how to debug Angular 1.x applications from the browser's console. But how can we achieve the same in Angular?

Learning Angular: Creating a tabs component

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 01:00:00 +0000

This is a follow-up article of thoughtram's excellent article on developing a tabs component with Angular, where we're going to explore an alternative way of creating a tab component by learning about @ContentChildren and AfterContentInit.

Learning Angular: Conditionally add styles to an element

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Here we're going through a couple of ways to conditionally apply some styles to a DOM element in Angular. (adsbygoogle = window.

About Personal Productivity

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Thinking aloud about productivity, what I'm currently doing about it and where I think I need to improve a lot. (adsbygoogle = window.

Multi Content Projection aka Multiple Transclusion

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 01:00:00 +0000

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); If you’re an AngularJS developer, I’m sure you heard about transclusion. Sounds really weird and mysterious, at least that’s what I thought when I first heard it.

Upgrading Angular from 1.x

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Yesterday the Angular team released Angular 2 in beta. With that, they also added an interesting step by step tutorial which guides you through upgrading an Angular 1.

Improve your Angular 1.x startup time

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0000

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); This neat and simple trick originally appeared about a year ago on this blog post, so it’s not something I came up with by myself.

Componentizing Workflow for Angular

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0000

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); $1 Yesterday I wrote a tweet about how I usually create components. Great workflow for refactoring unwieldy components :-) https://t.

Follow-up: EvolvingPublication

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Martin Fowler just published a "Bliki" article on his site about EvolvingPublication. This is a concept I've been using for a while now by myself and found it very useful.

GitLab Flow

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0000

I’ve already published a couple of Git guides on my blog here Git Explained: For Beginners Implementing the “Git flow” Git Flow with Jenkins and GitLab The main reason is because I needed it as a documentation for my work mates.

Egghead.io - Getting started with Redux

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Dan Abramov, creator of Redux has published 30 video lessions on Egghead.io explaining Redux.

Role of an Enterprise Architect in a Lean Organization

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Role of an Enterprise Architect in a Lean Organization http://martinfowler.com/articles/ea-in-lean-enterprise.html map the current state present vision to key technical leaders and get feedback, they know why certain things are the way they are upon consensus, make current + future state visible to all (not in a Sharepoint folder, or document) “build bridges”, become partner and resource for development teams When a new project starts, update the team of the latest vision Try to avoid getting mired in the details of the implementation focus on high level goals and design avoid temptation to immediately say no to new technology, discuss, do time-boxed proof of concept, measure, discuss success as an EA is only made possible with the support of the development teams build excitement of new vision, celebrate the victories (however small) try to bind technical changes to business changes build community of learning, involve passionate technologists, lead devs etc…give opportunity to share their learnings do not force people to attend training and learning activities.

Good Tech Lead, Bad Tech Lead

Sun, 29 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

A very good read and I couldn’t agree more on this. Here’s a quick summary of the main points from the article. Good Tech Lead, Bad Tech Lead https://medium.

Exploring Components in Angular 1.5

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Todd Motto introduces the .component() function that will be out in Angular 1.5. This is a further step for facilitating the migration towards Angular 2.

How to be agile in a non-agile environment

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Good article from the Gov.uk Government Digital Service blog. How to be agile in a non-agile environment https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/10/09/how-to-be-agile-in-a-non-agile-environment/ It’s damn hard if not impossible to be agile in a rigid environment, where upper management just won’t grasp the benefits from having such an approach.

REST Api Design - Resource Modeling

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Important note: this is not something I've written up by myself, but it's rather a summary, some highlighting of the most important quotes with some of my comments for an awesome post on the Thoughtworks blog about API design.

Screencast: TypeScript - Setup Your Working Environment

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); First of all, this is my first screencast ever, so be patient 😉. The idea is to quickly demonstrate how you can setup your working environment s.

Use ngModelOptions to limit digest cycles

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Some good hints on how to speed up your Angular app by limiting digest cycles.

Angular Connect London - Day 2

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m lucky enough to be able to attend AngularConnect here in London. This article is my notebook from the sessions I attended on day 2.

Angular Connect London - Day 1

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m lucky enough to be able to attend AngularConnect here in London. This article is going to be my notebook while attending the conference. Also take a look at my notes from day 2!

Breaking apart conceptions by Ayende Rahien

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Cool guy talking about the cost of abstractions and why you should often step out and critically look at what you do. Don’t do it because you always have done it like that.

Release your libs like a pro!

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Automate, automate, automate. That's what ultimately is our job, right? We automate the tedious processes of our end-users. So why don't we do it for ourselves as well?

10 Interview Questions Every JavaScript Developer Should Know

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Good article, definitely worth reading. Here are the questions: Can you name two programming paradigms important for JavaScript app developers? What is functional programming? What is the difference between classical inheritance and prototypal inheritance?

El Capitain Broke My Developer Stuff! Here's How to Fix It

Sun, 04 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

El Capitan might have messed up with your developer tools. This article shows how to fix it again.

On Monoliths and Microservices

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Have cross-functional teams vertical decomposition: create vertical slices, being as independent from each other as possible (self-contained systems) vertical services may be even large -> split internally services don’t have a common DB as that would create a tight coupling between them good experiences with “Fat JARs” which can be executed via java -jar <file> (starting an embedded Jetty or something.

Building an Enterprise CSS Framework

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve already had a couple of times the chance to work on a common style guide for our enterprise-wide web applications. It really is tough.

12 Rules for Professional JavaScript in 2015

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Some good tips you should already be following if you want to code JavaScript as a professional.

ES6 Features

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Want to learn about ES2015 (ES6)? The site provides a list of all features. Besides that I’m currently also writing an ongoing article on ES2015.

Easy testing with angular-spies

Sat, 26 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Small useful lib by Shai Reznik (@shai_reznik) that aims at helping you to test your Angular apps.

$q.defer: You're doing it wrong

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Nice article on Angular deferreds, promises and things you may do wrong. use $q.when(['detail', 'simple']) for simple defereds use promise chaining whenever possible, like return $http.

Angular 2 survey results

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Jeff Whelpley presents the results of a survey he conducted on Angular 2 among Angular developers. Some interesting insights and potential predictions for the future direction.

What forces layout/reflow

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Googler and web development expert Paul Irish published a nice list of JavaScript functions which trigger a synchronous layout recalculation by the browser. Obviously these are common performance bottlenecks in rich JavaScript applications.

Are you making these 10 Unit Testing mistakes?

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting article that lists 10 very common mistakes I encountered (and made) myself. Check it out.

GitHub: Scaling on Ruby, with a nomadic tech team

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Cool article on GitHub’s tooling and infrastructure. It’s not shipped until it’s fast

ES2015 - Jump Start

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, this is another article about learning ES2015 (known as ES6). It’s my journey of learning it, as well as my personal notepad for new stuff I discover along the way.

Why We Should Stop Using Bower – And How to Do It

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ya…those package managers. Lot of people suggesting to move away. I like NPM, or even JSPM, but I’m not yet sure whether the latter is the new bower…

Why You Should Avoid a Canonical Data Model

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Stefan Tilkov writes about why canonical data models can be a bad thing. Totally agree as I’ve come across this by myself as well. Instead of trying to define one model for the entire application/service landscape, it would rather be a lot more productive to focus and define the data responsibility.

Angular 1 and Angular 2 integration: the path to seamless upgrade

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since when the Angular team at Google announced the release of Angular 2, a total rewrite of Angular v1, hot debates started around whether there’ll be a migration path.

Ultimate AngularJS and Ionic performance cheat sheet

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting article that lists many performance tips and tricks for Angular v1.x. $watch one-time binding track by use $log instead of console.log disable debug diagnostics -> $compileProvider.

Building a desktop application with Electron

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Really cool article that does a step by step intro about how to build a desktop application with Electron. Electron is basically the shell which runs GitHub’s open source text editor Atom.

Host and Visibility in Angular 2's Dependency Injection

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

@PascalPrecht dives into the details of Angular 2’s dependency injection. Angular 2’s DI to solve all current issues more flexible; concept of host and child injectors Definition of a binding on a <video-player> component:

semantic-release - @kentcdodds talks to @boennemann

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Kent C. Dodds talks with Stephan Bönnemann, the creator of semantic-release. Semantic-release automates the releasing process (to NPM,…) automatically determines the correct semantic version based on conventional commit messages generates a nice changelog on GitHub is even able to detect breaking changes based on failing tests executed on Travis … much more to come (just check out the official repo) I didn’t yet watch the video, but I’m sure it’s worth it!

Preparing for Angular 2

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sure you heard about Angular 2 and that it will be totally different. Forget everything you know and start from scratch 😮 . Jokes apart, if you have taken a closer look you already know that, yes, it will be new, things will be different (as it’s mostly the case with new stuff), but many concepts will still be there.

Learning Angular: Testing $q promise resolves with Sinon and Jasmine

Tue, 30 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); This article shows a brief example on how to properly mock and resolve a $q promise from within a Jasmine unit test.

Learning Angular: Expose an API on your directives

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ever wanted to not only create a nice, visually appealing directive or web component, but to also provide a more rich programmatic API with it?

Guide as in Mountaineering

Sat, 06 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, I happen to deal with architecture, software design and technology. And yes, I’m entitled by the term “software architect”. I don’t like it that much, though.

GitHub: be Social, Contribute, Learn

Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub revolutionised the open source world by building - IMHO - the first true social coding site. It has never been that easy to contribute to a project, whether it is to simply discuss some new features, to file a bug or in the best case to submit a bug fix or new feature patch: a pull request (PR).

Jersey WebResource - Header don't get appended

Thu, 14 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I ran into a strange problem when using the Jersey WebResource class for doing HTTP calls: it seemed as if the headers I set, simply got ignored when executing the HTTP call.

Nepal: Help for Anil Joshi

Fri, 08 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This is not the kind of post you usually find on my site here. But it’s the story of a good friend of mine who tries to help Anil, a young Nepalese who lost his home during the big earthquake at the end of April.

Migrate from TFS to Git

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Are you using TFS and would like to switch to a distributed VCS like Git? Well then this article might be of help. I quickly wrote down the required steps and some hints for exporting an existing TFS repository to Git.

Learning Angular: Set your language culture before any UI is displayed

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 01:00:00 +0000

In this article I briefly outline an issue I had, namely to make sure that my language’s locale files are loaded by angular-translate before any UI is shown.

Learning Angular: Verifying whether a function has been passed to my directive's isolated scope

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 01:00:00 +0000

When you create isolated directives, you usually use the scope property to define your directive's external API. Some of the APIs properties might be mandatory while others are optional and based on that state, your directive might react differently.

Learning Angular: Access directive scope variables from directive controllers and vice versa

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Angular directives can have a separate, isolated scope, which is even the suggested approach most of the time. And they can have directive controllers. But…how do I access the directive’s scope variables from the directive controller and vice-versa?

Backup your Win8 computer to your Synology NAS

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 01:00:00 +0000

I love my Macbook Pro which I’ve been using now for about 6 years. At work I’m a PC user and lately I acquired a Surface Pro 3 as well.

Notes: Microservices by Martin Fowler

Sat, 03 Jan 2015 01:00:00 +0000

I just watched Martin Fowler’s talk about Microservices at XConf. Here are some of my notes and related thoughts. The talk is heavily based upon Martin Fowler and James Lewis’ article about Microservices, so you can find and read most of the information there.

Happy new year 2015!

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 01:00:00 +0000

A very short post as I’m preparing to go out for celebrating New Year’s Eve. 2014 has been a great year, with its ups and downs.

Kudos for your site - powered by Firebase

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 01:00:00 +0000

I don’t quite remember, guess it was about more than a year ago when I came across a Svbtle-hosted blog where I noticed a small little circle, bouncing when you hover it and showing a number followed by “Kudos”.

Learning Angular: Useful utility functions

Fri, 28 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Today a very short post. Angular has a series of utility functions which you should definitely take a look at. They are not as feature rich as those of underscore.

Learning Angular: Unit Testing $watch expressions

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Today I wanted to write a unit test for a watch expression on my controller. What seemed quite obvious initially, turned out to be quite nasty.

JavaScript Promises Essentials

Tue, 18 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0000

JavaScript is asynchronous by definition which is what makes many server-side developers struggle initially. Many even try to avoid asynchronism as much as they can rather than to embrace it.

Learning Angular: What is the scope of your directive??

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0000

This might create quite some debugging headaches, especially in a larger application. Things don’t bind properly, have different data on the scope than you’d expect etc.

Learning Angular: Gosh, my two-way binding doesn't seem to work properly!

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Angular data-binding seems magic, but obviously isn't. You have to give it a chance to do its work. As such, watch out and think about the difference "

Sublime Tip: Enable spell checking when you write Markdown

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0000

This is a huge lifesaver and I don't know how I couldn't come up with this before. Check out this post to learn how you can enable spell checking when writing Markdown documents with sublime.

Introducing the learning-ng series

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0000

With this post I’d like to introduce to you the - what I’d like to call - learning-ng series; a number of short and concise posts that describe issues and solutions on my journey of climbing up the Angular.

Avoid test code duplication in Jasmine tests

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Test code has to be treated like production code. Obviously we cannot charge the customer for it, it’s something that helps us developers to make sure we keep our codebase healthy, which ultimately is the responsibility we have towards our customers.

Want to invite your friend to Inbox by Gmail but have no invites left?

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Slightly off-topic, but that might still awake your interest if you recently followed the hype around Google’s latest product: “Inbox”. “Inbox by Gmail” is currently invite only.

Static code analysis for free

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Although JavaScript might be the world’s most misunderstood language, it is now among the most popular and most used ones. Thus you should also treat it as such.

Hack: How to mimic a disabled checkbox

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The world is not always as we want it to be :). So from now and then you have to place a nice hack here and there.

Implementing the 'Git flow'

Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Git can be used in a variety of ways which is cool. But still, when working within a team, it is good to have a consensus on a common, shared approach in order to avoid conflicts.

Node, Grunt, Bower and Yeoman - A Modern web dev's Toolkit

Fri, 15 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims at introducing you to some of the currently most popular tools when developing modern web applications with JavaScript. These are totally not new at all and have been around for a couple of years now.

Lazy Angular Modules

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Startup time is crucial for a proper user experience and that’s where many JavaScript SPA really fail. Even though you might (and definitely should) apply code minification and bundling mechanisms, you wouldn’t want to load your entire application right upfront.

First baby steps with Angular.js

Sun, 11 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This article outlines some of my notes of a webinar about Angular.js I recently participated at. These are really just “baby steps” in that it covers the very basics that might help to get started.

See, always told you: testing is just a waste of time

Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Automated testing has become something people don’t speak about any more. It matured to being a standard in software development, everyone is and should be practicing.

QCon London 2014 - Embracing Change - Building Adaptable Software with Events

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Building adaptable software is what we continuously aim at achieving during our day to day work. However, at the same time, it’s probably the hardest part in software development.

Integrating Node.js with a C# dll

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I had to integrate a Node.js based server application with a C# DLL. Our software (a web-app) offers the possibility to execute payments over a POS terminal.

Packt Video: JBoss EAP Configuration, Deployment and Administration

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Packt Publishing recently approached me about quickly reviewing a video series on JBoss EAP and its configuration, deployment and administration. Although I’m primarily working with the .

Automating the build of MSI setup packages on Jenkins

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 01:00:00 +0000

A short “how-to” based on an issue one of my work mates recently faced when trying to automate the creation of an MSI package on Jenkins.

Decision making, problem solving, introducing ideas, being influencial

Wed, 05 Mar 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Usually when people think about software development, they just have the typical nerds in mind, shy but smart, introvert people sitting in (often) dark rooms hammering down obscure instruction sets on their keyboards.

Automate your UI testing with Nightwatch

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 01:00:00 +0000

Although I feel like I'm repeating myself, automate **everything**. We're here to automate the processes and work of our clients. Why don't we do the same for our own stuff as well?

Git flow with Jenkins and GitLab

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 01:00:00 +0000

At work I recently helped a team to transition from TFS to using Git as their source control management. After introducing the members to Git, we also established a common workflow on how we wanted to have Git integrate with Jenkins and GitLab.

JSConf.eu - React: Rethinking best practices

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Today I saw a tweet pointing to a JSConf talk by Pete Hunt from Facebook, talking about ReactJS, Facebook’s JavaScript frontend framework. Here are my notes.

Boot your ajax app: Creating a splash screen with NProgress

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 01:00:00 +0000

While single-page JavaScript apps tend to be more dynamic and usually more interactive from the user point of view, they also most often have a longer startup time compared to more classic, server-side rendered apps.

The narrow path between best practices and over-engineering

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 01:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I read a post by Petri Kainulainen about The Dark Side of Best Practices. He really hit what - IMHO - on the one side should be totally obvious and common sense, but sadly, too often is not the case at all.

JBoss Weld CDI for Java Platform

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 01:00:00 +0000

CDI stands for Context and Dependency Injection and is the standardization of the process of dependency injection for Java EE. This article presents some of my comments and observations when reading “JBoss Weld CDI for Java Platform” which covers everything you need to successfully implement the new standard in your Java EE application.

Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML5 and JavaScript

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After JavaScriptMVC, today the second book arrived where I participated in the technical review process: “Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML5 and JavaScript”. Doing the technical review was again a pleasant experience.

'object' does not contain a definition for 'errors'

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today I ran into an interesting issues when writing a unit test for an ExceptionFilter which involved inspecting anonymous return types. I basically had the requirement to return a Json object with a predefined structure (for our ASP.

JSConfUS 2013 - Angelina Fabbor in JavaScript Masterclass

Tue, 06 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Continuous improvement is an important concept. Everyone wants to get better, to learn new things. This is vital, especially in the software industry where things move at an extremely fast pace.

How to add a reading time indicator to your blog in ten minutes

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Time is money, right, and given that nowadays we are continuously being flooded with an enormous amount of information, we need to be fast in consuming it and particularly good at filtering what’s worth and what isn’t.

TypeScript: Application scale JavaScript

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This article is about Hejlsberg’s talk about TypeScript at the Build 2013 conference. TypeScript is now already around for about 9 months or so and I like the concept behind of being something to improve the tooling around JavaScript but not really re-inventing a(nother) new language that compiles to it.

Setting up a WPF Application With PRISM

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post mainly functions as a documentation for myself on how to setup a WPF client to use PRISM which emerged from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices team and is the successor of the Composite UI Application Block.

Code Coverage with QUnit in JavaScriptMVC

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Beside giving you an immediate feedback, unit tests are extremely useful as a regression test suite. They basically build a safety net around your code, giving you the freedom to apply changes without breaking anything existing.

Learning JavaScriptMVC

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

About half a year ago, Packt Publishing approached me for a technical review of a new book about JavaScriptMVC they were about to publish. I agreed and started to participate in the review process.

Unit Testing Tip: Create Descriptive Tests

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Your unit tests should be as descriptive as possible. The feedback they give you should be so clear you don’t even need to fire up the debugger and step one by one through the code to inspect your local variables.

Vae Soli

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Couple of weeks ago I got my medium.com account activated. It is basically a blogging platform with social character. Beside being a great platform to write, it is also optimized for reading and especially collaborative writing in that it allows you to invite people to comment on your writings and as such immediately provide you with extremely valuable feedback.

Caching, jQuery Ajax and Other IE Fun

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In the last couple of days I had quite a fun time debugging problems of our JavaScript SPAs on oldIE (thanks God we got the Browserstack licenses).

Getting Started with Git and Visual Studio

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an introductory article “Git Explained for Beginners” which aimed at introducing Git to beginners on the basis of Git’s underlying tree structure.

Blog Like a Hacker with Jekyll and Nitrous.IO

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

One of the best moves I probably did about half a year ago was to move my Blog from blogger to Jekyll, hosted on GitHub.

Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I previously wrote about my Sublime Text setup. Well, Tuts+ has published a quite nice Sublime Text tutorial showing most of Sublime’s features. Regardless of whether you’re a Sublime Text enthusiast or not, you should definitely take a look at the tutorial.

Git Explained: For Beginners

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working with Git now for about two years but only for my personal projects and those I have on GitHub. At work we still use TFS and SVN (as of now).

My Sublime Text Setup

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I absolutely love this editor. A ridiculously fast editor which has everything you’d love to have, from a simple notepad to an advanced, extensible IDE with auto-completion and highlighting.

Modularity in JavaScript MVC Frameworks

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

JavaScript MVC architectures are a de-facto standard when you create complex single-page JavaScript applications. But it doesn't stop here. MVC helps to separate reponsibilities for coordinating the data (model) and visualization (view), but it doesn't have a concept for coordination among an application's modules or widgets as you might call them.

Entity Framework: Intercepting SQL Queries for Contextual Logging

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Proper logging is of major importance and a must have in any serious application. Writing logs is trivial and is already done successfully by a couple of open source libraries.

Mocking Internal Interfaces with Moq

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

When creating some Class Library you should pay attention to the visibility of its members and have a clear vision of what you’d like to expose to its users and what on the other side should be hidden.

Interview with DZone

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

DZone, where I'm part as an MVB, recently contacted me for an interview for their weekly newsletter edition. Yesterday it got published. If you're interested in their newsletter, the best way is to follow DZone on their Facebook page.

The Coaching Architect

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

In this talk, Roy Osherove speaks about how to become a better coach. A nice talk highlighting some of my personal principles I try to follow every day.

DZone MVB Goodies Box

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Yesterday morning I received a nice little box with a DZone label on it. Seems like they sent it to me as part of the MVB program I recently joined.

Test Your App Under Slow Network Speeds

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

I guess that I don’t have to start talking about the importance of testing in the software development process. There are couple of different kind of tests which I’m not going to mention now, but generally speaking a good test should verify the correct implementation of the business requirements but also test the software on its boundaries and edge cases.

ASP.net MVC Action Methods: Testing Against Anonymous Return Types

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

I don’t use dynamic types regularly, but there are always again situations when they come in quite handy. Here is one example of testing an MVC controller’s return value.

How to Stay Up To Date On Web Technology

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

The web is evolving extremely fast, especially in the recent years I have the feeling that it really got up to speed. Just think about JavaScript two years ago compared to today.

Transformer TF101 meets Jelly Bean powered by CyanogenMod

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

During the Christmas holidays I found a bit of time to upgrade my old (but still nicely working) Nexus One to CyanogenMod 7 and I’m really happy about that.

Retrospective 2012

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Yes we’re still alive ;) No jokes apart, it’s time for a year retrospective. Normally, a retrospective consists more or less about asking the following three questions:

Gist: My New Devbook

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I always had the idea of having some kind of organized store, some kind of very simple knowledge base where I could memorize interesting stuff around software development which I encounter i my day-to-day business.

Cerego - Learn Anything, Everywhere

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

It’s now roughly 2 years I’m out of university. While also at may day-to-day job I cannot and don’t want to stop learning and getting better, the time at the university was probably the most intense in terms of studying and learning.

Programming ASP.net MVC4 by J. Chadwick, T. Snyder and H. Panda

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

This is one of the recent books I got from O’Reilly. It is probably the most comprehensive and detailed one I’ve encountered so far regarding ASP.

HowTo: Subscribe to Failed TFS Builds

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

When you use a build server it is a must to get notified in case of build failures. Microsoft’s Team Foundation server has different possibilities to achieve this: using the Build Notification Tool or through so-called Alerts.

Visual Studio: Where Did My Shelvesets Go?

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Do you use the TFS shelvesets?? I do, not regularly, but from now and then they’re quite useful for staging or even for sharing some unfinished work with others.

Deploying: Git vs. TFS Showdown

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I think everyone agrees deployment should be as simple as possible. Seems like everyone talks about continuous integration/deployment/delivery. More and more people (and cloud providers) start using the source control mgmt system as their deployment solution.

Don't Create Your Own Mapper, Let AutoMapper Do The Job!

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Mapping is a common task when integrating different systems with each other. Although it might often seem an unnecessary overhead, it’s highly suggested (even when you communicate within your own systems) as you don’t want to depend on the internal structure of another service.

Visual Studio Tips

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 01:00:00 +0000

At work, I spend a huge amount of my time working with Microsoft Technologies. As such, I also use Visual Studio. Here are some of the tipps and tricks to efficiently work with it.

Output Caching in ASP.net MVC

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Although nowadays most of us have broadband connections, resource caching is important as loading a resource from your local HD is (by now) still faster than fetching it remotely.

Lessons Learned: Don't Expose EF Entities to the Client Directly

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When we refactored our main application architecture, moving from an ASP.net WebForms app to a rich client JavaScript application with an ASP.net MVC REST backend, one of our main goals was to keep things as simple as possible.

HRT - Humility, Respect and Trust

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago someone told me: the hardest problems you'll face won't be of technical nature but rather they'll deal with interpersonal relationships. People are different (fortunately), different personalities, different capabilities, all mixed together.

2nd Dan Yoseikan Budo

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is obviously a rather non-technical post :). After officially passing the exam of the 2nd Dan in Yoseikan Budo about half a year ago, I now also received the diploma of the World Yoseikan Federation.

Visual Studio Test Explorer: Automatically Execute All Unit Tests Only

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In Visual Studio 2012 the team invested a lot in order to improve the testing experience. Sooner or later also the MS guys found the extreme value into having an automated test suite.

Finishing my Blog Relocation

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

About six years ago I decided to create a Blogger account and start blogging. That worked perfectly and it was a good way to start.

Find Code Duplicates with Sublime Text

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Code duplication is the worst practice ever, right? Well, actually there might be situations where duplicating can be better than factoring out, but these are very rare.

Know Your Tools: Become a JavaScript Power-Developer

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

One of the issues classical web developers have when diving into the rich JavaScript apps world is their tooling. They are accustomed to work in fully integrated environments where you fire up a webserver, you directly set breakpoints and live-inspect the state of the app.

Fluent Conference: JavaScript & Beyond Complete Video Compilation by O'Reilly Media

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Missed this years Fluent Conference in San Francisco? Then this amazing video compilation is probably for you. It contains all of the sessions nicely bundled and in high quality.

Jasmine - An Introduction

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This page is the result of taking notes from the session about Jasmine by Davis W. Frank at this years Fluent Conference in San Francisco.

It's time to learn CoffeeScript

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Seing and reading all the stuff about CoffeeScript, I thought it might be useful to get into that “language” as well in order to get a better understanding.

git tf - An Early View

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I really like git. I actually don't know exactly why. I guess it's mainly also because GitHub is such a nice platform and probably because git is extremely fast and compresses the source code nicely.

Mobile JavaScript Application Development by Adrian Kosmaczewski, O'Reilly Media

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you are a JavaScript newbie eager to dive into creating rich mobile web applications, this book is for you. It is structured in a very clear and intuitive way, introducing the most useful HTML5 features, some JavaScript performance tips, jQuery mobile and Sencha Touch examples and illustrates even how PhoneGap works.

Entity Framework Schema Translations

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You should have different setup environments, right. Normally something like dev, test (or staging) and production. This implies to have different DBs as well. At work we have Oracle databases and there we don't really have different DB "

Testing and the Single Responsibility Principle

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Automated testing is hard! Therefore, if you're about to learn it, just keep going. Resist the initial learning curve as afterwards it'll allow you to adopt a completely different programming style.

UX: Why GitHub for Windows is better than VS TFS Integration

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Did you already try GitHub for Windows? It's created in a modern Win8 looking style. Initially it actually feels a little bit odd, but the more I use it, the more I like it.

An Example of Test-Driven Bugfixing

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately many people still don’t use a test-driven approach during development. That’s sad given the bunch of advantages automated tests give you. One of my favorite is regression testing.

Why $.extend(someObj, anotherObj) might be dangerous!

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You often have the need to merge two objects. A common use case is that of combining parameters for a $.ajax call. jQuery has a nice function for that, namely jQuery.

IE8 Trouble Continued...Hangs on Dropdown Selection

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The trouble seems to continue. In one of our apps, when clicking on a dropdown list, IE8 hang up completely. I quickly searched for similar problems and apparently IE has its issues with dropdowns.

Strange Error When Downloading File in IE8 from SSL Site

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago, one of our clients called indicating that he wasn’t able to download a file from our server. The file was basically generated on the fly from our ASP.

Setting up my Developer Machine

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Developers need to have fast machines! Today I just returned from a week of holidays at Kos (Greece). Amazing! So you might imagine that returning to work is usually less pleasant ;), but that changed when I opened Outlook and saw the email from our systems department that my new developer machine setup was ready.

Choose Your Commit Messages Properly

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote already a couple of posts about version control stuff and best practices related with it. So today, what about proper commit messages?

Detecting Location Redirects from JavaScript

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A common scenario for using the HTTP Location response header is during an authentication process where some kind of filter redirects to a login page in case when the user is not or no more authenticated.

Architecting for Failure at the Guardian

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Architecting for the Failure, a presentation of this year's QCon London 2012. Michael Brunton-Spall gives some insights into how they moved their architecture at the Guardian from a monolith system to a system composed of "

Visual Studio: Set the Build Action for an Entire Folder

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I'm sure you already encountered this problem, right? In my specific case I have a folder called "frontend" with a bunch of JavaScript, CSS and view template (EJS) files; my rich JavaScript client basically.

Scaling Android Emulator Size: Without using Eclipse

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As you might have read following my previous post I'm currently experimenting with mobile web solutions. In such a case, having an Android emulator is quite comfortable for quickly testing your solution.

HTML5 vs Android: Apps or Web for mobile development??

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is a hotly discussed topic recently. The web is now a fully-capable platform and it's getting better and better as the HTML5 standard advances.

Using NuGet to Distribute Our Company Internal DLLs

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Releasing new software has to be simple and super fast! That was not the case for our company-internal class libraries till a couple of month ago until I finally decided to take the time to optimize that release process.

Respecting "the Zone"

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Respect when someone is "in the zone"! Don't disturb him if it's not necessary. The "context switch problem" is a known issue in the software development process.

Joining the DZone MVB Program

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was kindly invited to join DZone as a MVB (Most Valuable Blogger). If you shouldn't already know, "DZone is a technology publishing company that produces valuable content for software architects and developers worldwide.

QCon London - My Personal Recap

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

From the previous posts (or from those on my Tumblr stream) you might have understood my participation at this year's QCon London. Actually it was my 1st QCon conference and I enjoyed it a lot.

Sharpening the Tools

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000

This is a talk from Dan North about Sharpening the Tools at QCon 2010. I had the great pleasure to listen to this guy at this year's QCon (recap is in the drafts already and will be published soon btw).

Questions for an Enterprise Architect

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Erik Dörnenburg answers: What is Enterprise and Evolutionary Architecture?, discussing 4 issues: Turning strategy into execution, Ensuring conformance, Where do the architects sit? Buying or building?

I Want the Cursor to be placed in the 1st empty Textbox!

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

You develop a webapp, you have a couple of input fields and buttons on your page. Then the requirement arrives. The customer wants his data to be auto-filled once he enters some identification number (the italian fiscal code).

Sequential Asynchronous Processing with jQuery Deferreds

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Asynchronous processing is one of the most difficult things for devs to understand when switching from the more traditional web programming pattern to a more client-server like model when creating rich JavaScript single-page apps.

ASP.net MVC3: Doesn't Deserialize Nullable Properties from Json

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I noticed that the Nullable properties of a C# object were not properly deserialized when posting back a Json object to an MVC3 action.

Don't rant! Become Social and Contribute back!

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Todays web experience has changed a lot and so has done coding as well. Everything is around being social, interacting with people through social networks, blogs or online communities.

Eclipse: Importing existing project: "Invalid project description"

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Monday morning, 07:30 AM. Me, starting the computer after the weekend, executing a git pull from my repository to fetch the latest src. Then I opened my freshly installed Eclipse JavaScript version followed by a nice "

Don't Fall into the IEnumerable<T> Trap

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Recently I upgraded some code of our company-internal class library and observed a plausible but still tricky problem. See yourself. In a class deep inside the class library ( ;)) there was a method which looked similar to the following:

Help, Ubuntu 11.10 won't boot!!

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Today I tried to start the new Ubuntu 11.10 from the live CD on the old desktop computer of my girlfriend. Her computer is quite slow and the old WinXP installation broken.

2011 Retrospective and a New Look

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I know it's a bit late for a 2011 year recap, but I didn't manage to write one earlier. Actually, I just noted that I didn't publish one last year at all.

Writing IoC Supported Integration Tests using AutoFac

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

Using a dependency injection framework can greatly facilitate your code's testability in that you don't have any "glue" code for managing a classes' dependency that needs to be mocked (if even possible) when writing unit tests.

Exploring JavaScript: Scope Pollution when instantiating JavaScript Objects

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

John Resig has written a very interesting article (I'm not able to find just now) on how the current scope might get polluted if you're accidentally invoking a function intended as an object constructor function without using the "

Saying Goodbye to University

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

After my thesis presentation in march this year, my university career now ended officially with the degree ceremony last saturday. I remember when I first inscribed myself about 5 years ago, at the Free University of Bolzano at the faculty of computer science.

Large-scale JavaScript Application Architecture

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

JavaScript programming has evolved a lot over the past years and has somehow revolutionized the way you develop on the web. While many initially just used it as a scripting language to quickly hack in some dynamic behavior into traditional websites, it starts now to be used much more like a fully capable programming language (mainly also due to many emerging JavaScript libraries and more capable browsers).

Some Usability Thoughts for the Weekend...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I got the order to write a very simple program that would take a bunch of XML input files with the task to elaborate them in terms of grouping them according to some identifier and then to output the result (grouped per directory) in a more user friendly and readable way.

Use The "var" Keyword to Have More Maintainable Tests!?

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

I have to admit that initially when the "var" keyword has been introduced in C# I was quite precautious in using it. It does reduce code readability, I thought.

AutoFac: ASP.net WebForms UserControl Dependencies Only Available At Page_Load Event

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

I'm currently adapting the architecture of one of our old but core projects, still written in ASP.net WebForms and with our custom ORM mapper. Since we're currently starting to release a new version of the project, we decided took the opportunity to also exchange our custom ORM mapper with Entity Framework and at the same time I introduced AutoFac for providing dependency injection.

jQuery Validation: Add a Required Field Marker

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

When you use jQuery for validating input fields you might want to automatically (based on the validators) decorate your according field labels or input fields with appropriate markers that indicate required fields.

Don't Underestimate the Trouble Caused by URLs in Emails

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

At a first glance, the title might seem strange, but wait. The company I'm working at creates e-government solutions, so the target audience are the citizens, from the young, very computer-literate ones to the more elderly (and often, but not always) less computer-literate ones :).

Exploring JavaScript: Iterating Over a Collection of Items

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If I manage to do it, I'd like to write a series of introductory posts about programming in JavaScript as when listening to the latest hypes it is going to play a major role in programming the web but even desktop or mobile apps (see Microsoft's latest moves regarding Silverlight, HTML5 and their new Win8 OS).

What? Model-View-Controller in JavaScript?

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

At work I'm currently working on a new web architecture composed of a rich client written in JavaScript and an ASP.net MVC server-side backend exposing a REST-like JSON api. An important part of that work is to also train developers on that, quite new way of programming web-apps.

TechVid: Become a Javascript Console Power-User

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A nice 7 minute video showing some Chrome, Opera and Firefox power user commands for the JavaScript console.

The Similarity of C# and JavaScript Syntax

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently diving deeply into creating rich JavaScript web applications. You cannot deny that they are now the must have for modern-looking web (2.0) apps.

Testing JavaScript: Mocking jQuery Ajax Calls

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

When "seriously" developing JavaScript applications we obviously need to write tests. Being a fully dynamic language (similar as Ruby), tests are more necessary than ever since there is no compiler that checks for you all the silly mistakes before you run your code the first time.

JavaScript Scoping by Example

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding the scoping rules of JavaScript is one of the fundamental things to learn when getting started with the language. I just found this link posted by @codylindley on Twitter.

Integrating Jersey with Spring

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Spring provides a lot of benefits and promotes best practices with its dependency injection mechanism, application lifecycle management and Hibernate support (just to mention some).

Why Did it Have to Be So Complicated Before??

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I started web development using Java, basically during my studies at the university. When working on my bachelor degree thesis I needed a web server back-end system (to my mobile J2ME client); I decided to do it "

Chrome Developer Tools: 12 Tricks to Develop Quicker

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is definitely a "must-have-seen" video for every JavaScript developer. Chrome has some really nice features build into their developer tools which are being demonstrated in this short ~5 min video.

Experiencing the jQuery 1.6 Breaking Changes

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately I did not actively follow the release of jQuery 1.6 as I would probably have noted that they introduced some breaking changes which would have prevented some issues at my side.

JavaScriptSerializer: Circular Reference was Detected While Serializing an Object of Type...

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Consider an ASP.net MVC web application where you use some Ajax for retrieving an object. Let's start from the server-side MVC controller: public class BaseDataController : Controller

How often did you use the Yield keyword??

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you think about your coding...how often have you used C#'s yield keyword? To be honest I continuously forget to use it myself, too. But it would be so useful in certain scenarious.

Check-in Small Pieces to your VCS!

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago our TFS master at work :) sent around a statistic about the "ExcutionCount" of each developer w.r.t. the TFS. The result was me on top of the "

Posting JSON Data to an ASP.net MVC 3 Web Application

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The trend in today's web application development goes more and more in the direction of having rich, desktop-like applications. There are numerous examples on the web, just watch out while your navigating around (Google services are always a good place to look for such apps).

Write the Minimum Necessary Code In Your Unit Test Case That Makes It Valuable

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Maintainability is of major importance in software development. Usually writing tests against your codebase increases maintainability in that it gives you some degree of freedom in making changes, at the same time assuring you did not break any existing logic.

Android Development Tools

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Till recently, (IMHO) Android Developers had a very bad experience in designing graphical UIs for their Android apps. Personally I never relied on the graphical designer that was provided with the Android Eclipse plugin.

Create DOM Tree out of a Dynamic HTML String

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Just a very short post before I go to bed as I'm really tired today. I just played around with some JavaScript code, building a Google Chrome extension when I came to the point where I needed to process the DOM tree of a HTML string.

SmellyCode: A Classical Example of Non-Unittestable Code

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I know there might be some degree of repetition in my posts when I speak about unit testing and mocking, but I always again come over similar problems in code I'm reviewing.

Should Android Worry About the iOS 5 Update? Definitely Not!

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

With the announcement of the new iOS 5 at the WWDC, the first articles emerge already on the web relating the new features with the existing Android OS.

HowTo: Upgrade RAM of Your Macbook Pro

Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here's a nice video that clearly explains how you can upgrade your Macbook RAM:

Visual Studio: The application cannot start

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today I started my Visual Studio 2010 instance by using the "Run as administrator" option (as I often do when using the local IIS server for hosting my webapp).

Basta-On-Tour Wrap Up Day 2: EF Best Practices, JavaScript, MVC

Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Day 2 at the BASTA! On Tour was dedicated to different kind of small workshops. Web 2.0 Applications with ASP.net MVC, Entity Framework and jQuery

Basta-On-Tour Wrap Up Day 1: Entity Framework

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Well, this is a very short and brief wrap up of the 1st day here at the Basta! On Tour in Düsseldorf. The session was about Entity Framework, hold by Dr.

Document and Share Your Snippets: Presenting SnippetDoc

Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Increasing the productivity in the long run is most often tightly related to increasing the quality. Beside introducing best practices like automated testing, defining standards is a good way to start.

Is It More Readable??

Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was just going over some code and came across some webservice methods having a lot of repetitive conditional statements checking the language - represented by the corresponding two-letter code and send by the client from JavaScript.

Trouble with the VS QualityTools.UnitTestFramework dll

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently build a tool that automates and simplifies the unit testing of large parts of our application's business layer. The system works by declaratively specifying scenarios in xml files which are read by using the MS test's data driven test cases and validated against a set of "

Why Automated Tests Boost Your Development Speed

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Many critics against writing automated tests directly address the additional time that is needed for coding them, which alternatively could have been invested in writing new functionality.

Load JavaScript Files Asynchronously

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently worked on a component for our single-sign-on system. As part of that work I also developed a small JavaScript file that was included in the top-header of the page for rendering the username, last access and session expiration or alternatively the login link in case the user wasn't logged on.

Concluding another Chapter

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 01:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I finally concluded my studies for the Master in Computer Science at the Free University of Bolzano/Bozen. I even managed to do it with the full grade of 110 out of 110 possible credits :).

A Test-Driven Dev's Nightmare: Meeting the HttpContext

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:00:00 +0000

My main task for the coming weeks at work is to extend one of our older but highly successful web application with new functionalities. The webapp has become quite complex over the years, as it happens with most applications when they're being extended.

JCG - Joining the Java Code Geeks Program

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 01:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I was kindly invited to the Java Code Geeks program. Their goal is to build an online community for Java developers by aggregating and republishing content from different bloggers on their blog.

Help, Gingerbread drains the Battery of my Nexus One!!

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 01:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I finally got the eagerly awaited system upgrade to Gingerbread on my Nexus One. The update went pretty well, although some Nexus One users reported about problems with the updating process.

Getting Started with Android Development

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:00:00 +0000

Android has become very popular recently, especially among developers which would like to create some nice apps for mobile environments. This trend can be noted also when looking at the Android category on Stackoverflow.

Least Invasive Approach to Gain Root Access on the Nexus One

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:00:00 +0000

For my current Android research project I needed to copy an APK to the /system/app folder. Now for that you need root rights. Well, that shouldn't be a problem, right?

Deploy Android APK OTA Using Symbolic Links and Dropbox

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:00:00 +0000

Couple of time ago I wrote a blog post describinghow you can use Dropbox for deploying your Android APK basically over-the-air to your device. That involved copying your APK to a dedicated Dropbox folder that can then be accessed from your Android device to install it.

Coding an Update Functionality for your Android App

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:00:00 +0000

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); An immediate answer would be: why should I need that. I publish my app on the market which has a build-in update functionality.

FriendlyBool Extender What?

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 01:00:00 +0000

From now and then it happens that I have to databind some entities onto the UI, containing boolean datatypes like "Married" or "Editable" and so on.

Why Extract {Class | Interface | Method} Refactoring improves Testability and Readability

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 01:00:00 +0000

I still see many developers coding huge methods and large classes. The code looks very much procedural, having lots of conditional statements and loops one following the other and eventually even nested.

Android: HowTo Detect Installed SQLite DB Version

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:00:00 +0000

As you might already know, Android comes with a preinstalled SQLite database. This is quite handy because you can rely on it without the need to care about installing a DB along with your application (although you can, standalone, small DB's of course like HSQLDB).

ASP.net: Organize Your Resources the Correct Way!

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 01:00:00 +0000

ASP.net provides well-known mechanisms for localizing web applications, namely by extracting hard-coded strings into resources files. Localization for Pages and UserControls is fully automated and available from within Visual Studio.

Tomcat: IllegalStateException: No output folder

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Today, I started to create a couple of JSP pages for the server-side part of my MSc thesis project in order to be able to output some meaningful statistics of the underlying data in form of diagrams.

Win7: Windows Explorer Doesn't Refresh Elements

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 01:00:00 +0000

This was a really weird problem. Overnight Windows Explorer on my Windows 7 Enterprise installation stopped refreshing items. For instance, I created a new file and/or renamed an existing one and nothing happened until I manually pressed F5 to refresh.

Smelly Code: Direct Object Instantiation as a Testability Killer

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 01:00:00 +0000

This Smelly Code post discusses mainly a testability issue without going into further detail on other things like readability which could be improved for sure as well.

Update SDK to Platform Gingerbread 2.3: Conversion to Dalvik Format Failed

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Today I took the chance (and a bit of free time) to upgrade to the latest Android SDK release, namely Gingerbread. Experience has shown that you better back up your Eclipse as well as currently installed Android SDK folder, especially if you're working on an important project (which I consider my Master thesis project to be kind of ;)).

HowTo: Using VS2010 Web.config Transformations to Bypass SSL Authentication Locally

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Most often when you create WCF webservices you'll want to run them in a secure channel, for instance by using SSL encryption on the transport level.

Juri Goes GIT - First Steps

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Yes, I'm going "git" ;). An inherent part of structured, well organized working is to have your stuff under version control (1st point on the Joel Test).

Don't Let Your Test Doubles Fool You

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +0000

During unit testing it is common to substitute dependencies with a test double (see Martin Fowler's disambiguation). This is necessary for isolating the tested environment and consequently also the potential source of error in case of a test failure.

Testing Your SUT Against Exceptions

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +0000

When you test your method for exceptions (which is good practice) the usually naive approach - which btw I was following myself till today - is to wrap your method under test with an appropriate try-catch and set a boolean.

Android: Attaching ClickListeners Declaratively

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +0000

If you define a click listener for - say - a button in an android Activity, then you basically have three different possibilities. The "

More Than Just Synching - Dropbox

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +0000

You know Dropbox, right (if not, head on to get it here)? I totally love that tool. I mean, you nearly don't notice its presence and actually that's what I love so much.

HowTo: MySQL Workbench to Remote Ubuntu Production Server Using SSH Port Forwarding

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Before starting, I'm totally not the Linux command line guru, unfortunately. It feels like years of just using Windows base OS makes you a wizard-click-through guy ;).

Intercepting WCF Operation Calls with Impersonated Identity

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Take the following scenario. You have a WCF webservice with several operations. The communication runs within a secure SSL channel and uses Kerberos authentication. The webservice application runs with an assigned application pool user, in your .

Test-Driven Development and Automated Testing: A Metaphor

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation is an important factor when learning something new. It is what makes you ambitious and what helps you forget the effort that needs to be invested.

Smelly Code: Eager Test

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post shows a common code smell in unit tests also mentioned in the xunit test patterns book, namely "Eager tests". Original, smelly code public void testSaveSession(){

Introducing #smellycode

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Couple of month ago, after posting some comments about bad code on Twitter, my ex-work-mate Peter (greets to Oz) asked me to show it s.

Lessons Learned: Make your ListItemCollection Linq Queryable

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I love Linq! In my opinion it is one of the best features that have ever been added to C#, making developers extremely more productive.

Retrieve Selected Items on Checkable ListView: Differences in SDK Level 7 and 8

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently testing my Android app that I'm developing for my MSc thesis on different real devices. While I own a Nexus One with Android Froyo 2.

Design Tech Talk Series Presents: OO Design for Testability

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the main challenges in adopting TDD methodologies and automated testing with xUnit frameworks is to create an appropriate OO design that is testable.

TDD Test == Unit Test or TDD Test <> Unit Test?? Is it Really Important??

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I had an interesting buzz conversation with a former work-mate, Peter. Just like myself he heavily orientates his learning to best practices, especially into agile software development methodologies and automated testing.

HowTo: Teach Visual Studio to Remember Your TFS Password

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I often now ran into the problem of continuously getting queried for the TFS credentials when connecting to the company's TFS server from my personal notebook.

Do I Really Need to Test This??

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yes! Let's start straight of with an example. Consider I have my service (business) class SourceCodeItemService and an according SourceCodeItemDao class in my nicely layered app and there is the method removeSourceCodeItem(SourceCodeItem) with the following content

Testing Newbies: Some Thoughts about Test First

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A quick post just before diving into the weekend filled with Yoseikan training, swimming, going out with friends and - of course - Android coding :) .

Passing Property Names the "compiler-safe" Way

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A common bad practice which I often find when browsing through code is to see people directly hard-code strings in their source code. I've also proposed some refactorings in some of my previous posts.

HowTo: Install your Android app OTA on your device for testing

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A fundamental thing when developing Android apps but also in general when developing with device emulators is to test your app on real devices. Android makes this easy.

Practical example: Applying the Template Method design pattern

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As I already mentioned in my previous post I'm currently doing domain objects to XSD generated object mapping. Monotonic, exactly, but I'm approaching the end of the work.

Refactoring for the sake of compactness and reusability

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Currently I'm doing a rather monotonic work, let's call it like this. We basically need to serialize our data to an XML file that has to match a given XSD which has been given to us by our customer.

Let tests guide you through development

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently working on my MSc thesis work which is divided into a project that has to be developed (in my case an Android application) and then the according paper that has to be written.

Android Instrumentation test - AndroidTestCase: java.lang.IllegalAccessError

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today I started writing the instrumentation tests for the Android platform side of the project. For your understanding, here's the structure of my situation:

HowTo: Get an Android app's database from the emulator

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Most apps need a database for storing their data onto the device in a structured form. Android's natively supported DB is SQLite. Now of course if you develop an app you'll probably have the need for inspecting the stored data during development.

Why factories with configuration files are better for decoupling but still a testability killer

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As I already highlighted in several previous posts one of the most critical things when facing unit testing is an appropriate design. My sensation is that those rejecting unit tests.

Boost your productivity using shortcuts in Visual Studio

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A major aim of everyone is (or should be) to increase his personal productivity. Now productivity is a vast term actually. It can be related to individual programming productivity focusing on code quality problems but it can also be related to management issues and so on.

Can you trust your tests?

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One important thing about unit testing but also about testing in general is that you can trust your tests. If that nice little bar shines green, then your logic should be fine.

'\n' will break your JSON jQuery - WCF service call

Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I recently coded a WCF REST webservice that needed to be accessed from JavaScript. Basically it was a system to provide admins of websites with a real-time system for managing info messages, intended to be displayed beneath input fields.

Test-Driven-Design: A real world scenario of an email sending requirement

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Many applications have requirements to send automatic emails to their users, especially in web environments. So it was also in my case. Summarizing in a few words, the requirement was the following: Automatically send an email notification to the company coordinator as well as to the admin (in CC) in case of a rectification of an already transmitted order (let's call it this way).

HowTo: Prevent Visual Studio from auto-formatting your jQuery source

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

When writing JavaScript code with Visual Studio 2008 it automatically formats your source code when going into a new line or placing the ";" delimiter.

Unit testing asynchronous code

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today I wrote on a first prototype for my current thesis research. I started coding just ahead however - at the same time - trying to find a good design which has a high potential to be reused for the final system.

Tackle software dependencies with IoC and Dependency Injection

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Coupling between objects creates "dependency", which per se is not bad at all. You will always have some dependencies among your objects. It becomes bad when it increases abnormally since that will make maintenance a nightmare.

GWT Button with image AND text

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

GWT just provides the basic widgets like check boxes, hyperlinks, buttons etc...and leave the more complex ones to the developer or to 3rd party providers.

Client-server communication peculiarities with GWT and App Engine DataNucleus

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

I just had to fight with a strange exception which got raised after a GWT-RPC call to the App Engine back-end server which had the purpose to persistently store an entity into the data store.

GWT Hyperlink Widget with Image

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Standard GWT Hyperlink widgets don't seem to give the possibility to associate an image. This is quite awkward since you may want to provide nice icons along with your links.

GWT, App Engine and App Engine Data Classes

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

I currently have some time before starting with my Master thesis project which will bring me back to Android programming. So to make use of that, I started to develop a project I already wanted to implement a couple of years ago, but due to my Master studies I didn't have the time to.

DockLayoutPanel doesn't work correctly??

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Suppose you'd like to create a layout like the following using GWT: With GWT 2.0 the documentation suggests to use the DockLayoutPanel. <g:DockLayoutPanel unit='EM'>

HowTo: Launch JavaScript after async postback of UpdatePanel

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Assume the scenario where you want to launch a JavaScript function after your UpdatePanel finished to do its async postback. This turns out to actually be quite simple.

GWT DecoratorPanel style problems

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

I just experienced a nice side effect that happens if you use a DecoratorPanel. In my example it contained a list of items and everything is fine.

Reloaded: Clean up your folder. For MacOS

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

When downloading files from the web I usually have a predefined folder where all the downloads from my different browsers are stored. It doesn't take long till that folder grows to quite a remarkable size.

Are anonymous Lambda style event handlers a readability killer?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

A standard event handling method in C# looks something like this public void SomeOtherMethod() { MyClass aObj = new MyClass(); aObj.MyCustomEventName += new EventHandler(OnMyCustomEventName);

Time Machine backups to Windows shared network drive

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

As some of you may have already read I acquired a MacBook Pro about half a year ago and I love it ;) . Now one of the really cool things OS X provides is Time Machine backups.

HowTo: Use your iPhone as a remote control for presentations

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

My latest post is already a while back but I'm currently extremely busy. More posts will come in February. Today, I successfully presented my talk for the final exam of the "

HowTo: Use globally defined resources in your ASPX code

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

When creating localized web applications using ASP.net you may often come across strings which are the same on many of your interface parts. Usually you probably use the VS functionality "

Comments smell! Replace them with more expressive code.

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

As already pointed out in that post, here's another code example: ... //300 = Italy if(aCompany.NationId == 300) { ... } ... The comment above the if clause is definitely a code smell.

HowTo: Fade out div after some seconds using jQuery

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Today I made a quick change to my blog. I don't know whether many of my readers noticed the possibility of expanding the reading area by clicking on the gray vertical bar which separates the left column with the post content.

Android SMS activity doesn't fill phone number

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Today while fixing a bug for our current project we develop for the Android phone I found a strange behavior when trying to launch the phone's SMS sender activity.

Creating Test Suites with jUnit 4

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

A while back I've posted about how to enable the automatic (jUnit 3.8-style) creation of test suites in Eclipse. That was necessary for Eclipse 3.

The power and simplicity of the Command pattern

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Never thought of how to implement an "undo" function? Not that easy, huh? People in our architecture class today came up with quite creative solutions: two separate stacks storing operations, versioning of the object to go back etc.

MapView doesn't fire onLongClick event

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Here's another curiosity I came across today while programming on my Android project. I was creating a MapView for displaying some interesting stuff on it.

HowTo: Include JavaScript file from JavaScript code

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Recently a colleague asked me on how to add a JavaScript file reference to an HTML document from within JavaScript code. It's actually quite easy.

Implementing the onTouchEvent for the MapActivity

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Android View classes expose an onTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev) method. As the name already suggests, by overriding this method you can handle touch events done by the user on the current view.

Visual Studio intellisense not working properly

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Recently a work mate pointed me out that my Visual Studio Intellisense seemed to not work correctly. When writing... this.Page.GetPostBackClientEvent( ...the info with the remaining parameters should appear automatically which was not the case on my machine.

HowTo: Get the selected list index on Android Activity from context menu event

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Consider the situation where you have an Activity displaying a list of items. You have a context menu and a normal option menu. When pressing the option menu button, you can get the selected item and index as follows:

HowTo: Run IIS 7 on Vista 64bit OS in 32bit mode

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago, I ran into a nice problem. I had to configure the setup of a new project using an old ASP based application as the entry point from which then the new ASP.

ASP.net Ajax: Consuming webservice from client-side JavaScript

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I answered a question on SO related to the problem of consuming an ASP.net webservice from JavaScript on the client-side. So I thought it might be a good idea to put it down in a downloadable example that can be used as a starting point for all those that didn't yet use this method.

Instantiating object from generic type: Java vs. .Net

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Consider the following .Net code: public static class Processor { public static TItem CreateInstance<TItem>() where TItem:new() { TItem result = new TItem(); return result;

Accessing the host machine from your Android emulator

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0000

I recently started a project where I develop an Android app (there will some posts later on ;) ) which accesses a remote server as its back-end, hosted on the Google Appengine.

Repeater looses its data collection. ViewState problem?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0000

A while back I experienced a really strange problem in one of our ASP.net applications, namely my repeater control which was loosing its data collection after a postback to the server.

Part 1: Writing testable code for the Android

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Creating testable code is one of the major aims when designing good, maintainable applications. I actually just started to take a look at developing for the Android and after playing a bit around with UI components, I started to develop a design that allows me to create a nicely testable Android app.

Blog to learn...

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

John Skeet answered a question on SO related to how to learn good programming in terms of learning good software design. I liked John's statement which btw explains pretty much why to have a technical blog like this one here.

Annotation tools for the Mac

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When you create scientific reports or you just prepare for exams you usually have to go over a whole bunch of papers, lecture notes and websites.

GWT meets Spring

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

GWT is quite evolving recently. There are a couple of reasons for that: Coding apps like Gmail and Google Wave We all appreciate the speed of the Gmail UI.

Are C# regions a good thing??

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I'd say it depends. If you use regions to logically group your code in your class, then it may be a good thing 'cause people come to your class and see something like

Law of Demeter: Nice metaphor

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just came across a nice metaphor for explaining the Law of Demeter. For those of you that didn't yet hear about it, the Law of Demeter is a object oriented design principle.

Microsoft Ajax CDN

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Scott Gu' just announced the launch of Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network. The name already explains mostly everything. It allows you to retrieve Ajax script libraries for your web application by specifying things like this

Add semantic through your code, not through commenting

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Is it good to have a lot of code comments, explaining things s.t. your other team members know what was your intention when writing certain pieces?

Watch out when cloning objects

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Cloning is never a good thing. I would say in most cases there is a better alternative for reaching your goal, but now and then it happens that you need it.

It is not about writing tests, its about writing stories

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Writing unit test and moreover having them in place when developing is a great thing. They give you some kind of assurance (if well done).

Don't use negated method names!

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

What does this mean. Don't write something like public bool IsNotCorrect(...) { ... } but rather write public bool IsCorrect(...) { ... } and the caller of the method then does the negation by calling it like

NullsafeGet extension method? Simplicity for the cost of readability??

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When programming, there is often the the situation where you have to continuously do the null-check in order to not get exceptions. For instance take the dummy example of a Person object with an according Address object.

HowTo: Control the rendered Html tag on your custom, composite server controls

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Normally when you want to achieve that your custom server control is rendered inside a specific HTML tag you don't override the Render method, but you do something like

HowTo: Changing TFS workitem type from task to bug

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I found a bug while implementing another feature and in order to not forget it, I created a new work item for our Team Foundation bug tracking system.

Around(J2)ME listed on Softpedia

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A project I developed together with my colleague Matthias Braunhofer during the course of Mobile Services at the university has now been listed on Softpedia.

Using code metrics as indicator for code refactoring

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Developing software is not just hacking in a solution, but to develop simple, well structured and therefore maintainable constructs. There are a couple of design guidelines that one should follow (some of them are here) to achieve this.

Server Error: Validation of viewstate MAC failed.

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you get the following error... Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm.

VS Designer: 'X' could not be set on property 'Y'

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently developing some custom ASP.net server controls. Internally I often have lists, where the user (programmer) can specify a variable number of sub-controls which are consumed/managed by the parent custom server control:

Automatically find the Label associated to a WebControl through the AssociatedControlID

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

ASP.net Label controls own the property "AssociatedControlID" which points to the control to which the label is associated. This property will then be rendered as "

HTML list item background image disappears on IE

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently faced the problem that the background images that have been added to an HTML li tag over CSS disappeared on Internet Explorer (on Firefox and Webkit browsers everything worked fine).

ExecutableTask pattern to tackle J2ME multithreading

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Programming on the mobile device is quite different to more common environments like web or client-server desktop applications. Although mobile devices become always more and more powerful (i.

MIDlet for downloading image from the web

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

J2ME provides several ways for creating an Image object: Image.createImage(String) Image.createImage(byte[], int, int) Image.createImage(InputStream) If you want to download an image from the web to your local J2ME application, you - of course - have to establish an HttpConnection and retrieve the image with a simple GET.

Do you know the "Joel Test"?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

First of all, who is "Joel"? Joel Spolsky is a software developer in the US. I came across his interesting blog about a year ago.

About Scrum - in under 10 minutes

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a nice video that explains Scrum in under 10 minutes. It was quite useful when preparing for the exam in Software Quality Management. Some of you might be interested in it.

Mashup editor about to shut down

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

According to a note on the official Google Mashup Blog, they're about to shut down the Google Mashup Editor product. They took the valuable info they got from a numerous of Mashup developers to develop their AppEngine which will somehow replace the Mashup editor, although it is a different, much more complex product (with more features of course).

HowTo: Getting started with JUnit testing for Liferay portlets with Netbeans (for Eclipse users)

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Besides at work, where I'm developing in .Net using Visual Studio, I'm a heavy Eclipse user. I use it for a lot of things, programming J2ME, J2EE, when developing Java desktop clients (using Eclipse RCP) or even when writing LaTeX documents.

Page Speed: Firebug add-on for analyzing web page speed

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Google just released Page Speed, a Firefox add-on for analyzing web pages in terms of speed. The tool directly integrates into Firebug and automatically verifies your page against a set of best practices rules.

HowTo: Keep request parameters on validation errors with Spring's SimpleFormController

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had a problem when using Spring's SimpleFormController together with validation. So I posted on StackOverflow, got an answer, that didn't work out so I found a solution and answered to myself :)

HowTo: Get localized string different from the current culture

Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Localization is a key part of most applications. For this purpose you usually use resource files (property files in Java, actually they are the same) with the according culture extension, like "

What happens if you think in Java and program C#

Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm quite jumping between the two languages. In the morning at the university I'm usually programming Java and then in the afternoon at work I'm programming in C#.

Use Google Scholar and Latex for correctly citing papers

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Citing papers is somewhat critical. There are predefined styles that have/should be respected. But it can be really easy. With Latex you can define a kind of "

JsTestDriver - Easy unit testing for JavaScript code

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Today this video got my attention which is basically a short demo of JsTestDriver, a nice implementation of easy unit testing for JavaScript code. This allows to easily create automated test for multiple browsers.

Help, my MSTest DeploymentItem doesn't get deployed!

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

MSTests allow you to define items you'd like to deploy to the deployment directory when executing the test cases. There are different ways for achieving this, either to configure it in your LocalTestRun.

String enumerations in C#

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Enumerations are a very handy programming construct. Especially when you're developing in a larger team, you can prevent a lot of problems and possible bugs by using enum types for properties that can just have certain values.

Intel ProSet Wireless tool causing a lot of trouble

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Years ago I installed the Intel ProSet Wireless tool for managing my wireless network connections on my HP Compaq. Initially it worked quite well, but then updating it several times introduced a couple of bugs such as delaying the windows startup time because a related service waited till a certain timeout for proceeding etc.

Debugging and Testing the Web with Firebug

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Comment Rob Cambell, member of the Firebug working group gives a talk about Firebug, its history and a short intro to the newest features in the latest version and how to use them.

HowTo: Make your custom ASP.net server control validatable

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Content validation is a major issue of every application. It is an absolute "must have" to notify the user about invalid data he may have entered.

jQuery plugin development pattern

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently diving more and more into the jQuery library. First I'm using it on a portlet I'm developing for the Liferay portal server as the project for a university course and secondly I'm planning to use jQuery on some ajax-enabled server controls I'm designing (I'm not yet 100% sure whether to use jQuery or Asp.

Use Firebug everywhere!

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You're a web developer and you cannot live without Firebug? Understandable. Firebug provides such great facilities such as JavaScript debugging, direct content modification of CSS and HTML, DOM inspection and much more.

Best practices: The challenge of designing software for wireless devices

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Designing good software for wireless devices such as mobile phones is not straightforward. Developers have to consider and address the device's constraints such as memory, processing power, input, screen etc.

HowTo: Bind an input field to a Date property using Spring's SimpleFormController

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you're using the Spring SimpleFormController for binding your Java bean object to the UI, you may come across the case where you want to create a binding between an input field (where the user inputs a date) and your bean's Date property:

Internet Explorer 8: Compatibility

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Here's an article written by Pietro Brambati on his blog about IE8 compatibility. It's quite interesting to go quickly over it, especially for web developers.

These damn spammers!!!

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Once again one of my blog posts got infected by "spam" comments. But this time not the usual pharmaceutical spam messages which you immediately recognize.

Extended view reloaded

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0000

With the transition to the complete new blog design I initially had to leave away some features which I had on my old blog layout.

Best practices: Deploying webapps (contd.)

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Some time ago I've written a post about best practices in deploying web applications by mentioning the different environments Development environment Testing environment Production environment

UML Use Case "extend" and "include" relationships

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0000

From now and then I have to create UML diagrams to model certain parts of software projects, especially for the University. Initially, creating UML models, may seem annoying but in fact they can be very useful if they are applied correctly.

Floating figures and tables with Latex

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Latex provides you with a lot of advantages when writing scientific papers. It allows you to fully focus on the content without having to worry to much about the formatting.

Problems with character encoding on cookies

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0000

For preserving the search criteria on some page of our web application we're saving the different settings of the search filters into a cookie. So, when the user comes back next time we can restore the search filter settings that have been used previously.

Del.icio.us links and three new projects online

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0000

My blog readers can now bookmark posts I've written with delicious, by just clicking on the "add to del.icio.us" link on the bottom of each post.

Guidelines for promoting your blog

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Some guidelines on how to promote and so to increase the traffic on your blog. These "rules" have been taken from the Blogger Help and I thought some of you may be interested.

HowTo: Set the assembly binding location

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

This post is somehow related to the one I made just a couple of days ago. The application plugins (dlls placed in a special folder of my app) are loaded dynamically at run-time with my small "

Getting ready for mobile development with Eclipse, WTK and EclipseME

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

I just noticed that I did not post one topic about mobile development with J2ME, and that although my thesis was all about J2ME, location-based services and mobile client <-> server interaction.

HowTo: Detect Assembly dependencies at runtime

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

I'm currently developing a small project for myself, where I'm trying to build a small plugin framework (for experimenting purposes). In that environment I just came across the problem of detecting an assemblies dependencies at runtime.

Observation: Selected value behaviour of the DropDown list control

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Today at work I observed a quite "nice" behaviour of the ASP.net DropDown list control. We usually have some kind of databinding mechanism for binding our domain model onto the UI.

Google AJAX APIs: The Google Visualization API

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

From now and then I'm always taking a quick look at Google's API page to see whether something new and interesting is there. Today I got stuck at the Google Visualization API, an API that may be especially be interesting for developers involved in web technologies.

Installing and configuring ATI graphics card drivers on Ubuntu Hardy

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

For the "Data Mining and Data Warehousing" course at the university, we had to implement a spectral clustering algorithm (I've already written another post related to it).

HowTo: Persist viewstate on the server-side

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

In our last web project we had some performance issues, mainly caused by the extremely big page viewstate of our asp.net pages. If you then add Ajax capabilities to your site, using UpdatePanels, you really get in trouble.

Accidentally deleted the Ubuntu main menu bar!!

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

I just clicked accidentally on the main top panel on the Ubuntu desktop and damn...I deleted the menu bar...shock!! But actually after some minutes of searching it's really easy to restore it actually.

HowTo: testing jFace Action class taking a StructuredSelection object

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Let's consider the following jFace Action class: public class RateAction extends Action { private final int fRating; private IStructuredSelection fSelection; /** * @param rating

Accessing webcontrols inside the ProgressTemplate of an UpdateProgress

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Apparently it is not possible to access server-side web controls that are within the "ProgressTemplate" of an UpdateProgress control. If you have for instance the following code

Best practices: Tracking information on the source code with Visual Studio and TFS

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:00:00 +0000

An issue in managing a code base is not only to guide different developers through the development process, preventing that they overwrite each others modifications on the source code (which would for sure happen when just sharing the code files over the normal file system.

By far the best "404 Not Found" notification I've ever seen!!

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:00:00 +0000

I just wanted to download a zip-file from a url provided by one of my university professors, but sadly the URL didn't exist and a "

Blogging year 2008

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 01:00:00 +0000

First of all, happy new year 2009, I wish you all the best! :) This is a scheduled post of course :D I'm not in front of the PC over new year, and you shouldn't be neither.

First steps with Silverlight. What about GWT?

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Last week I had some time which allowed me to do some experiments with Microsoft Silverlight. I had to give it a try since you hear so much on the web about it, so I was quite curious, how it works out.

Using extenders to abstract details and improve code readability

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Extenders are a really cool feature of C#, which can be quite handy sometimes. I found the following extender I've written the most useful. Think for instance how often you have to write conditions like

C++ linking libraries to build configuration in Eclipse

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

When programming in C++ you may often have to link at compile time to 3rd-party libraries which you're using. In Eclipse you can do that on the project properties dialog, as demonstrated in the screenshot below.

C++ experiences

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Most of the courses I attended during my Bachelor were Java oriented with some C#, C and Haskell programming. C++ never got really touched, and if, then just to illustrate some theoretical stuff, meaning some C++ code was used to describe a design pattern etc.

JFace Table API with Eclipse RCP

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Today I had to create a new view inside on an Eclipse RCP application representing data inside a table. I found the following article

Haskell type conversions: converting a String to Int

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Today I just finished my battle-ship game written completely in functional programming (using Haskell). In order to have the user interact with your game you clearly have to write and read from the command-line.

Persisting the current perspective state of an RCP

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

If you're developing on Eclipse RCP applications it may be interesting to save the perspective layout and open views of the user s.t. when he launches the application the next time, everything looks as before.

Creating "soft-links" to folders on Linux

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

If you're working on Linux, especially on the command line, you'll often have to navigate through a lot of directories. This clearly depends on your directory structure, but it may be the case.

HowTo: execute a file download from Windows command line

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Under Linux it is often very comfortable to download files quickly from within the shell by typing wget [some URL], especially if you do that from within a script.

The type X is not accessible due to restriction on the...

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

For some university course we currently have to modify an Open Source application with LOC > 50,000. So due to our particular interest in Eclipse RCP development, our team has chosen the RSSOwl, a smart Newsfeed reader which is based on Eclipse RCP (you should check it out).

Strange focus behavior on Firefox 3+

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Apparently it seems as if Firefox has changed the way the focus is set on the page starting with version 3+. When using the <yourcontrol>.

Verifying command line parameters on C++ main method

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Just a very quick example on how to verify the correct number of command-line parameters on a C++ (or C) main method: int main(int argc, char **argv) {

Problem: launching javascript from hyperlinks without redirecting

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:00:00 +0000

When I'm launching javascripts on a webpage I often use hyperlinks instead of buttons (it depends however on the context). So you may write something like the following

Javaforge causing a lot of problems

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:00:00 +0000

I'm currently developing an open source application for a University course. So as usually I established a common SVN repository for sharing the code among the developers.

C/C++ programming on Linux

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For a course at the university we have to develop a system using C++ on Linux. Being from the Java and C# world this won't become an easy task, already by choosing the right development tools and environment (coding, debugging, deploying.

Haskell functional programming

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Did you ever hear something about functional programming? I'm sure you did, and if you didn't you should check it out. In one sentence it is basically a more mathematical approach to programming.

Linux main menu bars (top and bottom) disappeared

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Linux (Ubuntu) is generally great...and still I must admit that most often ones habits are stronger I launch Windows. There are however many points that speak for Ubuntu.

Fighting around with VIM

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Today I attended the first lectures of the Master in Computer Science. Yes, I decided to go back to University for attending the Master, I'll continue however to work part-time because I find it important to keep up with the "

HowTo: Create 'linked tables' in MS Access

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Assume you have to migrate some historical data from an application which used an MS Access database to a new application which uses some other DB system (in my case an Oracle DB).

Best practices: Deploying webapps

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t really know whether you want to consider this a “best practices” or not, but I found the title appropriate. So the thing is how to deploy your webapp.

Revised: Changed values of readonly and disabled fields....

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post I wrote about the problem that the values of readonly or disabled fields are not retrieved after a postback because it appears as if ASP.

Changed values of readonly and disabled fields not accessible after postback

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I don't know whether you noticed this problem already. ASP.net doesn't seem to handle the viewstate of disabled and readonly controls on the UI (i.

Google Chrome: browsing the Google way

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I just came back from holidays at Rhodos (very nice) and flew over my mails and see there, one notice kept particularly my attention: Google Chrome, a new browser developed by Google.

JavaScript onChange event handling

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

When you're developing web applications you'll often encounter a situation where you react on changes of a control's data due to some user interaction. How complicated :) , well a situation where some user types something inside a text-field.

Strange GWT compiler error when trying to serialize Java objects

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I'm currently working on a project on my own where I'm developing a rich client by using the Google Web toolkit and a server using the Spring application framework.

The Controls collection cannot be modified because...

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Programming on the web (JSP, ASP.net, etc..) is quite different than programming a desktop client. On the web, everything is characterized by the request/response paradigm due to the structure of the HTTP protocol.

Dynamically modifying CSS class name attributes

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

CSS allows you to not only define the style attributes directly like <span id="mySpan" style="font-weight:bold; color:blue;"> some text within the span container... </span>but to define separate classes which is what is actually done in order to separate the design from the layout:

Extending JavaScript objects with custom functions

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It is nice how JavaScript objects can be extended with additional custom functions. Today for instance I needed a "contains" function (as it exists already on Java String objects).

GMap script being reused

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It is always nice to see people adapt and use your work. Today I made a quick look to my blog access statistics and found the following webpage using a Google map script which I made (description) about more than a year ago.

Recursive version of the FindControl(..) method

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I don't know why there is none already implemented in the .NET framework. Anyway it wasn't too difficult to write one by myself: /// <summary>

Specifying the size of a FileUpload control on Firefox

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Apparently there seems to be a problem on Firefox when you want to specify a size for a file-upload box (which is an HTML input control of type "

Testing Ajax applications

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Testing the correct functioning of an application is a major issue in software development. Errors happen and cannot (always) be prevented upfront. There are however some approaches to filter bugs already during development

IE problems with AjaxControl Toolkit's AutoComplete extender

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft's .Net AjaxControlToolkit provides a nice extender for doing Ajax-enabled auto-completion by calling a webservice on the server-side. Below is a sample: <cc1:AutoCompleteExtender2 ID="aceBirthPlace" runat="

The type [X] exists in both...

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

You cannot imagine how fraught this compilation error was! On average every second launch of my web application I got a compilation error in Visual Studio 2008 saying

The ViewState hell: controls loosing their values

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Recently at work I encountered severe problems with the ASP.net viewstate. We have build a very nice framework which we use on our web projects for dynamically adding validation controls to our text-fields or dropdown lists on the UI according to the validity of rules defined in the business logic.

Finally, my Katana arrived!!

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Not the usual technical post :). Finally on Thursday this week my new katana arrived. It's exactly the one you see on the image. I had already one before, but now I bought a professional one.

Attaching client-side event handler to radio button list

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to react to changes on a ASP.net radio button list from the client side you have to attach the appropriate JavaScript event handler.

No unit tests?? Forget it!

Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I know a lot of people that look somehow skeptic to unit tests and unit testing in general. They see it as an additional work that has to be done and often think it's just a waste of time.

Best practices: VCS usage flowchart

Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So now there’s the graphical representation of my yesterday’s post. Computer scientists usually understand these graphs better ;) Comments, critics or improvements are very welcome.

Best practices: version control system usage

Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I come to the office in the morning, start Visual Studio and fetch the latest versions of the source code....recompile the solution: COMPILATION ERROR. The build is broken!

Extended User Management under XP

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This will become just a very short post since I'm too tired to write a lot today. I just set up my little "server" the term is maybe not really appropriate, anyway.

Retrieving list of installed applications

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From now and then it happens that you have to reset your workstation, meaning to reformat your hard disk and install everything fresh. In this way you get rid of all the garbage on your PC.

C# refresher

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I changed work and am now employed at the SIAG, a local informatics company which operates mainly for the public administration sector. Today was my 3rd working day and I'm currently getting some intensive training for being able to join the project team as fast as possible.

Noo! Google Browser Sync deleted my Firefox bookmarks

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:00:00 +0000

I'm using Google Browser Sync already for a longer time since it is quite comfortable for synchronizing the Firefox bookmarks between the different computers (at work, notebook, main homepc).

Logical separation with MVC

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 01:00:00 +0000

I'm currently working on a personal project (which I'll publish here, so keep an eye on my blog ;) ) which I wanted to construct optimally in terms of the architecture.

Beside hacking each day...

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:00:00 +0000

...at the computer, I recently started a non-computer-science-related project :) , one where I was able to refresh a little my mechanical skills :) Already for a longer time now I had the need for a Katana stand.

Java Generics: C++ class templates vs. Java class generics

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Generics are a great thing. C++ already had already a similar mechanism called templates. This for instance allowed you to write completely abstract classes which could - theoretically - be of any type.

My new domain: js-development.com

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Right! That's my new domain. Finally I've bought one. I planned to do that already for a longer time, but till now there was never really the need for one.

Congratulations Dott.ssa Stefanie Franchi

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 01:00:00 +0000

I'd like to take the occasion to congratulate my girlfriend Dottoressa Stefanie Franchi to her successful graduation as Bachelor of Science in Economics and Mangement Sciences.

Creating simple backups with WinRAR

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:00:00 +0000

When I'm working on some code for a program I'm developing, I got into the habit of creating regular backups. That's quite useful, also when you're using a version control system (SVN, CVS,.

Roundup of blogging-year 2007

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:00:00 +0000

It's 2008!! I hope everybody of you had a good start. Well, I've seen that many bloggers post some kind of roundup, by summarizing the past year or by giving some stats.

Unknown protocol: d

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Today morning when starting a general build of the project I'm currently working on, I got an error saying "unknown protocol: d". It was strange since I couldn't remember of any big changes made and the build didn't also fail the last time.

Speakers don't mute when plugging in headphones!

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

As you may have recognized from the last post I start using Linux more often. With the new upgrade to Gutsy, Ubuntu's performance is much better (that's at least my feeling on my notebook) and I really start liking it.

Where has Beryl gone??

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I upgraded Ubuntu to the new 7.10 (Gutsy) version. I don't know whether you've read a post I've written some time ago about Ubuntu's desktop and window effects?

Learning by understanding and reusing code, not by copying!!

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Time ago - as you may have already read on this blog here - I started to experiment with the GME API. The result of my experiments was News Mapper (more here).

News Mapper experiences a revival

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

After I first published my Google Mashup project "News Mapper", it immediately got published first on the Google Code site of the GME project and then also on the Official GME blog.

Red-Green color deficiency: whats that??

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Well, it is a special kind of color blindness and I'm actually one of those guys affected by it. Recently I thought about posting something about it for sharing my experience with others but a friend of mine - Manfred - was faster :) He wrote a very nice FAQ with a lot of information regarding this topic.

Clean up your folder

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

It's actually not really worth to put a post about this...but anyway :) I recently coded just a simple one-class prog which deletes - or more specifically emtpies - a specified folder in certain time intervals.

TDD, JUnit 3.8 and JUnit 4

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:00:00 +0000

I don't know whether you already got in touch with Unit testing or TDD (Test-driven development). At least you should if you're developing software in a more "

Mapplets on own website: illegal???

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Today morning Alex - a friend of mine - wrote me a mail, pointing me to a pcwelt.de article with the header "Die illegalsten Websites der Welt - Teil 1"

News Mapper has success!

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:00:00 +0000

My recent News Mapper mashup seems to have some success (at least for me :) ). Today I registered 114 visits which is my personal record for 1 day :D .

News Mapper: A mashup experience with the Google Mashup Editor

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Now in the two weeks after my successful graduation and before starting to work I found some space for doing some programming experiments. :) What I planned already for a longer time now has been to do some JavaScript coding since it becomes an always more important aspect in modern web technologies such as AJAX and so on.

Blog Action Day: Water pollution and waste

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, the title is right ;). I know that I usually post computer science related stuff on my blog here, however today we have the Blog Action Day and I'd like to contribute a little to it (although I have my bachelor thesis presentation tomorrow.

Blog(ger's) Action Day

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I'd like to to do a little promotion of the Blog Action Day since I find the idea quite useful and interesting. I've read it today on the Blogger Buzz.

Appearing on BlugPulse

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

On Sunday 02 this blog was listed on the 6th position in the BlogBites section of BlogPulse. According to BlogPulse, the BlogBites section "intends to capture and present a daily snapshot of top stories from the world of blogs.

3-column-blog-layout

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some of my blog-readers may have noticed the change in my layout. At the moment I'm just testing it (there are still some design problems.

How to close Safari 3 for Win?? It's easy, just add a bookmark!

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Why that?? Simply because adding (or better trying to add) a bookmark will result in a total crash of the browser. I mean...ok...it is just a beta release and not really considered for the end-user, but the amount of crashes you experience are even too much for a beta version.

Qi Gong

Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Last week tuesday was my birthday and I received a nice set of "Qi Gong" balls (see picture) from my girlfriend. As somebody may have read , I practice Yoseikan Budo already for a longer time.

What now: Program Files or Programme??

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine has recently acquired a new Dell notebook with a German copy of Windows Vista. On the German Windows version there exists a folder "

Syntax highlighting on Blogger

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I recently found a JavaScript and CSS based syntax highlighting framework called dp.SyntaxHighlighter. The script works perfectly and it is really cool to have such a feature totally for free.

Beryl window manager

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some time ago, I wrote a post regarding Ubuntu where I also mentioned about the nice visual effects produced by the Beryl window manager. The effects are actually great and they can compete without any problems with Vista.

Logging is useful

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When I develop some application, I usually add a logging functionality to it. I find logging useful, especially for maintaining the application. Some bugs cannot be caught with tests and you often neither detect them when using the application.

Vista and stability??

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I don't have yet installed the new - so much promoted - operating system of Microsoft: Windows Vista, codename: Longhorn. However I recently had the possibility to see it running on a Dell notebook which a friend of mine acquired.

When Windows tray-icons disappear misteriously

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Recently when starting my computer, I noticed that some icons were missing in the notification area (how the tray-icon area is called on XP). Mainly AntiVir, Sygate Personal Firewall and the Intel PROSet Wireless tool were missing.

The first step in a long way....

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 01:00:00 +0000

I've always been a sporty person :). Already in elementary school I started to play soccer in a team, which I played for about nine years.

Diving into a new area

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 01:00:00 +0000

I never really got into the Linux world. Last year I installed Suse Linux, but I used it rarely, mainly for programming C which we needed for the "

Smiley-support for blog-entries

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:00:00 +0000

I like it to add smileys to my posts, since I find they make it much more personally. On my old homepage I put smileys by simply inserting the according IMG HTML tag and function getElementsByClassName(class_name){

Moving to a new home...

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 01:00:00 +0000

The step is done... :) After Blogger left its beta phase, I entertained the idea of moving my current webpage hosted at lycos to a blogger account.

Blogs on juri.dev

The React CLI you always wanted but didn’t know about

Shifting my role at Nrwl

Publishing a Next.js app to Vercel with Nx

Use Cypress with Next.js and Nx to battle test your React Components

Use Storybook with Tailwind in an Nx Workspace

Using Nx Workspace generators to scaffold new blog posts

Hot Reload MDX changes in Next.js and Nx

Component hydration with MDX in Next.js and Nx

Read and render MD files with Next.js and Nx

Setup Next.js to use Tailwind with Nx

Create a Next.js web app with Nx

Angular Services, providedIn and Lazy Modules

SoloCoder Podcast: About Coding and Martial Arts

How Remote Work Improved My Sleep

Common Chunk and Lazy Loading in Angular

Automatic Multi-Step Code Migrations with Nx

Scale React Development with Nx

I'm new to Nx. Where do I get started?

Access Selenium Test Screenshots on failed GitLab Pipeline Steps

Using the Nx Dependency Graph in Custom Scripts

Access Angular Material's MatSelect Options Panel Container

Detect when node_modules are out of sync

Partial Commits in WebStorm

AskJuri: Learning about Angular Elements

Create Nx Libs with Assets

Debug Jest with VSCode

Joining Nrwl 🐳 🦄

Git Rebase vs Merge

Talk: Lazy Loading on Steroids with Angular Elements

Talk: Enterprise Grade Angular Reactive Forms

Lazy Loading with Angular Elements and ngx-lazy-el

Manually Lazy Load an Angular Module with ViewEngine and Ivy

Debugging Angular Ivy Applications from the Devtools Console

Resume your Work with Git

Angular Performance: Precaching with the Service Worker

Angular Performance: Virtual Scrolling with the CDK

Angular Performance: Optimize Angular Change Detection

Angular Performance: Performance budgets with the Angular CLI

Angular Performance: Preloading Lazy Routes

Angular Performance: Route Level Code Splitting

Dynamically Load CSS with the Angular CLI

It’s time to say thank you to the Angular CLI Team!

Publish a Docker container from Bitbucket to Google Cloud Container Registry

Challenging the Testing Pyramid

Update to Angular Version 8 now!

Create Code Snippets for Visual Studio Code with ease

Angular 8 and the Future - NGConf 2019 Roundup

Lazy load Angular Components

Introduction to Angular Elements

Setup your Workstation for JavaScript Development

Productive Git for Developers

RxJS finalize operator to execute logic on Observable termination

A step-by-step guide to integrating a third party widget with Angular

Display Server Side Validation Errors with Angular

Explore Angular Router's runGuardsAndResolvers

Guarantee Event Order with RxJS

It's not just Standing Up

Learn Angular Router for Real-World Applications

Better Redirects in Angular Route Guards

Egghead Lesson: Simple caching with RxJS

Egghead Lesson: Avoid memory leaks when subscribing to RxJS Observables in Angular Components

Simple State Management with RxJS’s scan operator

My Journey replacing Promises with RxJS

[object ErrorEvent] thrown by Karma in Angular Unit Tests

In-depth: How do CDK Portals work?

Dynamic UI with CDK TemplatePortal and DomPortalHost

Extend the *ngIf Syntax to Create a Custom Permission Directive

Add Mocha reporter for Karma unit tests to your Angular CLI project

Create a CD pipeline with Angular, GitLab and Firebase

Create a ng-true-value & ng-false-value directive for Angular

Compile-time vs. Runtime configuration of your Angular App

Looking back on 2017

Three new Angular Courses to celebrate end of the Year 2017

Use Dynamic Components to render HTML for 3rd party libraries

Demystifying dynamic Forms in Angular

Understand How to Style Angular Components

Intercept HTTP Requests in Angular

Create a dynamic tab component with Angular

Enhanced *ngIf and *ngFor in Angular version 4.0.0

Enhanced ngIf and ngFor in Angular version 4.0.0