A Basic Guide to Building Chrome Extensions(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 6 days ago

Google Chrome has come a long way since it's early days. I am a big fan of the Chrome Developer tools and use it in my day to day development. There are also loads of great tools and extensions that are on offer at the Chrome store, and most are available to download for free. Depending on your requirements, creating a Chrome extension is really quick and easy - all it requires is a little knowledge of JavaScript and HTML. In this post, I am going to run through a tutorial that shows you how to create a small Chrome extension that allows you to display the top 5 posts on this blog from the RSS feed in a popup. It is a pretty basic example, but will give you a good understanding of Chrome extension development. read more...

add a comment |category: Other |Views: 89

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Running multiple browsers in one test run with Selenium(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 1 month, 1 day ago

The beauty of Selenium is that it allows you to test your UI against all of the common browsers out there at the moment. Writing the code to test for a test scenario is quick and easy and getting up and running with Selenium can be done in a matter of minutes. Selenium works alongside Nunit and also nicely slots in with your automated build environment. read more...

add a comment |category: Unit Testing |Views: 104

tags: Testing another

Selenium WebDriver - Using a Headless Browser in .Net(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 2 months, 7 days ago

If you have ever run a large suite of automated tests using Selenium WebDriver, you will know that sometimes it can take ages to complete. This coupled with different versions of browsers can be a bit of a pain. This is where Headless Browsers come in. read more...

add a comment |category: C# |Views: 36

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Dynamic Favicons using HTML5 Local Storage and TinyCon(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 3 months, 17 days ago

I was perusing Github the other day and I came across this awesome little JavaScript library. It's called TinyCon and it's a small library for manipulating the favicon in your browser. It adds alert bubbles and changing images pretty similar to the way Gmail does. It's basically a really fun little library that allows you to add a notification bubble to your favicons. I started to play around with the code provided on Github and got up and running in no time. read more...

1 comment |category: jQuery |Views: 148

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MVC Asynchronous Controller : The Basics(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 4 months, 9 days ago

When I first saw the Asynchronous Controllers introduced in MVC 2, I couldn't wait to start playing around. I thought that it would be a really easy to get up and running with a simple example, but after searching online for a few working examples - pretty much all of them used an event based pattern that wasn't easy to understand. In this blog post I am going to run through a really simple example that will show you the basics of Asynchronous Controllers, and show you how easy they really are. read more...

add a comment |category: MVC |Views: 205

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MVC and HTML5 Web Workers(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 5 months, 21 days ago

HTML5 Web Workers are cool. As a developer that spends most of his time working with server side code, I like to think of Web Workers as .net's System.Threading for the front end. Basically, Web Workers allow you to run client side scripts without interrupting the page or any other scripts that are currently running. They are basically an API specification that lets you create background JavaScript threads to process CPU intensive tasks. The major advantage to using Workers is that it allows long tasks to be executed without blocking to keep the page responsive. It's really good for fire-and-forget tasks and tasks that you can leave to run while the user continues working on the page. Another great thing about Workers is that getting started with them is really easy. read more...

add a comment |category: MVC |Views: 14

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Web.config Transformation Features in Visual Studio 2010(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 6 months, 18 days ago

When developing applications in Visual Studio, I normally pay a lot of attention to my Solution Explorer. However, I recently spotted something that I didn't notice before. Well, at least something that I haven't paid attention to! In Visual Studio 2010, if you click on the Web.config file and expand the node - there are two extra files - Web.debug.config and Web.Release.config. Now if you open them you will notice that they contain XML that is similar to your normal Web.config file. read more...

1 comment |category: C# |Views: 35

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Selenium Webdriver - Wait for an element to load(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 6 months, 29 days ago

I am currently working on a project that uses a lot of AJAX and delayed loading of HTML elements. This means that when a page loads, the object that I am looking for might not necessarily have appeared yet. In many instances the element may only be added to the DOM after an amount of time by the use of some JavaScript. read more...

1 comment |category: Unit Testing |Views: 30

tags: Testing another

Rendering PDFs with pdf.js using HTML5 and JavaScript(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 7 months, 13 days ago

A couple of clever guys over at Mozilla have thought about this and have come up with a genius way of displaying PDFs inside your browser using Javascript and HTML5. The code is available for download on Github. PDF.js is community-driven and supported by Mozilla Labs which means its good news for us as developers. In the long run this plugin is intended to render PDFs natively within Firefox itself and will eventually ship with Firefox. For now though, we can start using the power of this plugin within our applications today. read more...

4 comments |category: jQuery |Views: 413

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Memcached for C# - A Walkthrough(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 8 months ago

A while ago I wrote about Object caching in .NET 4. I think that the Object Caching in .NET 4 is a great tool to use for caching and literally takes minutes to get up and running. However, one of the downsides of using the System.Runtime.Caching in .NET 4 is that every time your application pool recycles in IIS, you lose the objects in cache. The same happens if you make a change to your web.config or redeploy your application. read more...

1 comment |category: C# |Views: 315

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MVC Data URI HTML Helper(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 8 months, 12 days ago

I have recently been looking into web page performance and one of the things I came across is the Data URI scheme. When you reference an image in your HTML, the client needs to go and retrieve the image. This creates an HTTP request and adds to the time it takes for the page to load. What is the Data URI scheme - well, it is a URI scheme that provides a way to include data in-line in web pages as if they were external resources. Instead of adding a reference to your image as a path or URL, you embed the image directly into the document using a Base64 encoded string. The browser automatically understands the string and decodes it there and then - instead of retrieving it via an HTTP request. read more...

1 comment |category: MVC |Views: 22

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Dean Hume - Responsive Design and CSS3 Media Queries(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 8 months, 18 days ago

Responsive Design and CSS3 Media Queries Tweet Regular readers on this site will notice that there has been a major change on the site lately. The design of the site has changed as well as the layout. I have been playing around with the idea of Responsive design and also updating the look and feel of this site for a while. It was quite colourful before and was in need of some serious updating! This is how it used to look before the update: Respons... read more...

1 comment |category: ASP.NET |Views: 11

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Dean Hume - MVC and the HTML5 Application Cache(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 10 months, 15 days ago

HTML5 has loads of awesome features and recently I have been playing around with a feature called the Application Cache. The Application Cache is designed to allow you to run your web application offline - that is, without a network connection. A web browser that implements HTML5 offline applications will read the list of URLs from the manifest file, download the resources, cache them locally, and automatically keep the local copies up to date as they change. When you don't have a network connection, the browser will automatically switch over to the local copies instead. Most modern browsers offer support for the Application Cache this includes FIREFOX (3.5+), SAFARI (4.0+), CHROME (5.0+), OPERA (10.6+), IPHONE and ANDROID. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't currently offer support for Application Cache. read more...

add a comment |category: MVC |Views: 11

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Dean Hume - C#(www.deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 11 months ago

While working through some code, I noticed a method that I have never seen before. I knew that the .Net 4 Framework had introduced a Parallel Class that helped make parallel ForEach Loops easier, but after some searching I came across the ParallelInvoke() method. read more...

add a comment |category: C# |Views: 7

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Dean Hume - C#(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 11 months, 2 days ago

While working through some code, I noticed a method that I have never seen before. I knew that the .Net 4 Framework had introduced a Parallel Class that helped make parallel ForEach Loops easier, but after some searching I came across the ParallelInvoke() method read more...

add a comment |category: C# |Views: 4

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Dean Hume - Automatic Resource File Translation with the Microsoft Tra(deanhume.com)

submitted by deanomachino(764) 11 months, 19 days ago

On a recent project that I have been working on, we needed the application to be multi-lingual and localized for different countries. The best option for us on this project was to use resource files (.resx) and let .Net handle the rest for us. Now creating these resource files wasn't really a problem, but adding and translating one for each of the languages we needed was going to take some time. This made me think if there was an easier way to do this. I had also recently been playing around with the Microsoft Translator Service and also wrote a blog post about it. read more...

add a comment |category: C# |Views: 3

tags: C# another