Sometimes, you just miss things. Something seismic happens and you had no idea. So it was with tsconfig.json.

This is very probably the dullest title for a blog post I've ever come up with. Read on though folks - it's definitely going to pick up...

I've done it. I've open sourced the website that I maintain for my aunt what is a nun. Because I think we can all agree that nuns need open source and continuous integration about as much as anyone else.

(& How to Express Functions in UTs)​

Have you heard the good news my friend? I refer, of course, to the shipping of TypeScript 1.4 and my favourite language feature since generics.... Union Types.

"Automation, automation, automation." Those were and are Tony Blair's priorities for keeping open source projects well maintained.

There's a small open source project I'm responsible for called jQuery Validation Unobtrusive Native. (A catchy name is a must for any good open source project. Alas I'm not quite meeting my own exacting standards on this particular point... I should have gone with my gut and called it "Livingstone" instead. Too late now...)

How I managed to gulp-angular-templatecache working inside Visual Studio​

Every now and then something bites you unexpectedly. After a certain amount of pain, the answer comes to you and you know you want to save others from falling into the same deathtrap.

There I was minding my own business and having a play with a Gulp plugin called gulp-angular-templatecache. If you're not aware of it, it "Concatenates and registers AngularJS templates in the $templateCache". I was planning to use it so that all the views in an Angular app of mine were loaded up-front rather than on demand. (It's a first step in making an "offline-first" version of that particular app.)

The observant amongst you may have noticed that this blog has a brand new and shiny domain name! That's right, after happily trading under "icanmakethiswork.blogspot.com" for the longest time it's now "blog.icanmakethiswork.io". Trumpets and fanfare!

Coded UI, IE 11 and the "runas" problem​

Updated 17/02/2015: I've taken the approach discussed in this post a little further - you can see here​

Loading On-Demand and Caching​

Enough with the horrific misquotes - this is about Moq and async (that's my slight justification for robbing Herman Melville).

I previously attempted to migrate my Jasmine tests from JavaScript to TypeScript. The last time I tried it didn't go so well and I bailed. Thank the Lord for source control. But feeling I shouldn't be deterred I decided to have another crack at it.

Anyone who reads my blog will know that I have been long in the habit of writing unit tests for my C# code. I'm cool like that. However, it took me a while to get up and running writing unit tests for my JavaScript code. I finally got there using a combination of Jasmine 2.0 and Chutzpah. (Jasmine being my test framework and Chutzpah being my test runner.)

With a little help from Chutzpah...​

I wrote a little while ago about creating a directive to present server errors on the screen in an Angular application. In my own (not so humble opinion), it was really quite nice. I was particularly proud of my usage of isolate scope. However, pride comes before a fall.

Up until, well yesterday really, I tended to have my Web API action methods all returning 200's no matter what. Successful request? 200 for you sir! Some validation error in the model? 200 for you too ma'am - but I'll wrap up the validation errors and send them back too. Database error? 200 and and an error message.

So. You're using AngularJS to build your front end with ASP.Net running on the server side. You're a trustworthy dev - you know that validation on the client will only get you so far. You need to validate on the server.

I've recently ported John Papa's popular Hot Towel Angular SPA Template to TypeScript. Why? Because it was there.

If you ever take a step back from what you're doing it can sometimes seem pretty abstract. Here's an example. I was looking at an issue in an app that I was supporting. The problem concerned a field which was to store a date value. Let's call it, for the sake of argument, valuation_date. (Clearly in reality the field name was entirely different... Probably.) This field was supposed to represent a specific date, like June 15th 2012 or 19th August 2014. To be clear, a date and *not* in any way, a time.