shaydoc

Do you have any plans to run asp.net MVC webapi on .net 4.5 using the task parallel library ?

You can pick up used DSLR's really cheaply these days, may aswell have one, might fuel an interest in finding out about Av & Tv modes, and white balance...plus lens' are what really make the big difference....I mean a canon EF 85mm 1.2 is gonna take a hell of a shot....

DSLR's take wonderful photographs, they are not comparable to a phone camera. Sure if you are taking snaps, I can sort of relate to the point, but do not denegrate DSLR's.

And yes,don't buy a DSLR to use it in Auto mode, you at least need a passing interest in amateur photography, or a penchant for art...

Here's a snap with my canon 500D, http://www.flickr.com/photos/casa_de_shay/5941345438/lightbo..., the bouquet is just great on the camera, can only dream of owning a 5D

I basically wrote a custom "durandal" to plug the missing infrastructure gap, however I must investigate durandal itself, i am sure it will add a little more sugar than my effort.

Basically I built a dal access layer based on promises for delegating to from my viewmodels. I also built a view transition manager into my app shell also, part of my core SPA framework.

I also added a bespoke option piece for hydrating routes. I have this api for my SPA called /public/routing and user/{id}/routing which returns the json config for API's for either anonymous or authenticated users. it is key on the Sammy Hash intercepts and provides me with the glue, i.e. what external view template should I transition too, what view Model should I load for this, also what API and Verbs are supported for the users role! its great, because my site admin can added routes on the fly, and its totally modular from a dev point of view, so if a new route can not be found, I just load the Empty View Template Placeholder (in development environment of course ).

KnockoutJS for me, its such a nice solution for the presentation view management. It also has some neat extension libraries, including external template engine, which loads rendering templates and caches them on demand. I use Jquery dependent SammyJS for navigation management. I have shell that manages loading view model/ views based on Sammy's intercepts...pretty happy, though I hear good things about angularJS, but it came along just a little too late for me to properly evaluate.

Bureaucracy is rife, particularly in Northern Ireland ( which is a part of the UK ), in fact the entire economy is built on Bureaucracy. Government departments have been the biggest employer here.

Some of the bureaucratic things they do is just absurd. For example, I have to purchase annual road tax for my car. Usually its no probs, you can phone a call center and pay over the phone after they do some "background checks".

I phoned to renew as usual yesterday, but was told they could not give me road tax because my car is due for an MOT (road worthiness test) in May. Now my current MOT is valid until 30th April, but because they can't predict whether it will pass or fail, they won't sell me my road tax renewal (or let me pay tax to them for the upkeep of the roads :-o )...which they sold me last year no problem with similar circumstances, seems they have just added a little more red tape to be sure :-)...

I could list several other interesting bureaucratic nuances, in fact you could probably write a book on it....

I am finding Azure really great,the platform itself has good integration with publishing from both github and tfs.... The setup with .net solutions is tight obviously.

I am using SQL azure, blob storage for files, persistent queues for background processing, tables for diagnostics, MVC 4 webapi restful services and a custom built single page app hosted as web role with automatic scale out cloud services, plus worker roles handling background queue processing, so all in all, scalability as a service, hard to beat... I couldn't imagine doing this without Azure with such a small team. Yes I work mainly with the Microsoft stack and this kinda ties me a little for now, but that shouldn't be an issue if the business succeeds as it has economies of scale.

Price reductions are always welcome..

Interesting reading. I have always loved music, pretty much anything. I just wonder if our genetics and DNA plays a large part in this. I often observe my little daughter's reaction to music, and its truly amazing to see how she will spontaneously smile and dance when a really good piece of music comes on. First time I really noticed big time was when the opening bars of Bruce Hornsby's "The way it is" came on the radio, she just loved it :-)

I wonder if we all get beginners templates of what we will like via our gene pool :-)

It's still possible to be minimalistic, with kids... Kids love nothing more than spending time with their parents, and that is something today's western world seems to infringe... If both parents are working long hours, what happens to the kids, where is the time and love to nurture and educate them!

Failure doing what you are passionate about is an opportunity to learn, to get better, to come back stronger.

The key driver is to become elite. To be elite and respected usually means you have talent coupled with an intense work ethic..

That's what I associate with American culture looking at it from here in Ireland...I would say that in Ireland for too long failure was frowned upon and it stifled innovation to a degree, whereas now that fear of failure is much less prescient.

Personally I have never feared failure maybe it was my upbringing, I always have been a trier, driven by my passions. I frequently set myself goals and timebox them, keeps the mouse running around the wheel!

Fact is, what goes up must come down eventually, apple has been riding on the back of seriously good innovations for a while and they possibly were overbought. The market gets jittery when it sees a stock to be over bought, no one wants to be last in, like if you bought a house at the top of the boom, so a pull back share value for now is frugal.

Apple's cash may flow freely, but unless they innovate further, they will lose market naturally. Personally, I think the market expects another innovation akin to iPod, iPhone, iPad.... To me I can't see their next step But I do hope they have one!

Prohibition on unlocking cellphones, unreal, who lobbied for that, When I hear stories like this, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", springs into mind!

I think for what I do that is true, 8:30 to 6, 9-5 etc is' old hat, its not how software Dev works IMHO... Especially since its very much an intellectual endeavour. Alot of time is spent thinking about things.

Also quantifying software development on the basis of time is also a broken paradigm, everyone is different.

What I am saying is that if tasks could be so well planned and decoupled, that anyone could pick them up and fulfill them, that would be the way to go, like a service bus, each task/unit has an associated monetary value. The end goal is that if a business is operating at capacity but needs more they could push a component request onto to the service bus and have it fulfilled by whoever, whenever ( within reason).

So I could join this service bus and pop some task off and code it, a bit like a software mechanical turk...and get paid and get some good karma points!

The maternity and paternity policies outlined are really great at Google, and isn't it fantastic they Google show such desire to keep their team happy, ultimately makes them all the more successful.

I think even more radical thinking on employee benefits is required in general by most companies.

Taking my own personal case, I am a software dude as is my lovely wife. We now have 2 young babies, to look after.

I like what I do as does my wife, but we are definitely not willing to outsource our kids upbringing to some random childcare provider, so the only choice is, one of us must leave the workplace....now both of us are highly skilled and experienced ( seriously) and I guess maybe if the projects were planned in such a way that smaller contributions could be made to them, then there might be a way for me or my wife to continue with our profession! If you get my drift...

Amazing, the knowledge acquired, distilled and shared to enable this is just wanted immense. My father had a major bypass op 6 years ago and I remember him saying how he felt when he first awoke after the surgery. He mentioned feeling cold!

That was a fantastic read. Incredible journey to hypothermia and back.

The description of the feeling of burning is unreal! What is even better is the incredible knowledge of how to revive a patient from this state.

I belief these techniques are used in heart bypass operations ?

I really like your executive summary there, these functional concepts really help with solution composition and abstraction. I really am pleased the penny has dropped with myself too. I am trying daily to encourage my colleagues to spend some time learning these functional fundamentals!

D3 is so good, the work of mbostock is quite brilliant, I am just starting out with d3 but I hope to really do some good stuff with it over the coming year and beyond!

I have built a html5 client of pure html5 + css + js and I am currently using asp.net webapi for the purely RESTful serverside, its great, its so clean decoupled and composable...

i would have thought ASP.NET MVC is quite mainstream and that webforms is slowly dying personally...

now with webapi and a pure html client, i see no point in MVC whatsoever!

Asp.net webapi is quite good, I have to say!

C# is a great programming language. I think this looks a bit like a service bus to me!

This is a great article, I can totally relate. I have been doing work that had not involved deep work for maybe a year, I kinda had plateaued my learning as a result of an unchallenging and demotivating work environment, I realised this is not what 'I' wanted to do, so I got out. I have hacker news to thank for this partly too.

4 months later I feel like a kid again my mind is like a sponge for knowledge, and because I have cleared my desk of non beneficial work, and as a result I have been learning at a fantastic rate.

Things I have been spending my team on include, functional programming techniques, JavaScript client architecture, pure REST api design, algorithms, visualisations in the browser (d3), geojson, node, mongo, redis, to name but a few

I have gone completely decoupled web html/css/ javascript client architecture talking to restful services, with support for web sockets thrown in too.

Enable your server side for rest and go web.

An excellent presentation, the interactivity really gets the message across!

absolutely wonderful stuff! how the heck do you get a job doing this stuff :-)

does it use parallax scrolling ?

I think the ribbon was an absolute disaster, i found it completely annoying and unintuitive, just my opinion though! In other words, I hated it!

Personally I think you've made one of the most invaluable contributions to web development, and your article is very sincere and genuine, well done on taking the time to put together such a great project.

While other framework's exist, bootstrap is packaged fantastically well, and provides excellent documentation

Functionality:

Share Hacker News Links with the Share Charm

Search Hacker News (HN Search) with the Search Charm

Read Hacker News Community Article discussion and comments

Open articles in Internet Explorer

Refresh the Top 300 items at will when connected to the internet

Live Tile displays top hacker news stories

As this is just a little project I have done an hour here or an hour there in the evenings or whenever I get a minute, don't expect mindblowing amazingness at the moment...version 1 is out now, 6 days in and I have had 200+ installations!

I hasten to add, combining this with KnockoutJS works wonders!

yes jQuery.Deferred is a very elegant solution to nested callbacks et all.... I have got it at the heart of the Single Page Application Architecture I am building currently.

e.g. stionaJS.DAL.authenticate(creds) .pipe(listDomains) .done(withMultiUserDomain) .done(withSingleUserDomain) .fail(failedAuthentication);

I love soundcloud, been using it for ages, HOWEVER, I am hating the redesign completely. I am coming from the perspective of being on it everyday for that past two years, and being happy with what it gives me as someone who stores music on it.

People can say UX this and UX that, I was more than comfortable with the previous incarnation, if ain't broke... ..just my 5 cents worth as a disenfranchised user!

..and so I will get used to it eventually!