I've been busy working on an open source project called jQuery Validation Unobtrusive Native. To see it in action take a look here.

The modern web is JavaScript. There's no two ways about it. HTML 5 has new CSS, new HTML but the most important aspect of it from an application development point of view is JavaScript. It's the engine. Without it HTML 5 wouldn't be the exciting application platform that it is. Half the posts on Hacker News would vanish.

Did you know that jQuery Validation natively supports the use of HTML 5 data attributes to drive validation unobtrusively? Neither did I - I haven't seen any documentation for it. However, I was reading the jQuery Validation test suite and that's what I spotted being used in some of the tests.

Last time I wrote about Cassette I was talking about how to generally get up and running. How to use Cassette within an ASP.Net MVC project. What I want to write about now is (in my eyes) the most useful feature of Cassette by a country mile. This is Cassettes ability to ensure scripts are served in dependency order.

Backing into the light​

The Vexation​

OK the title of this post is a little verbose. I've just wasted a morning of my life trying to discover what happened to my ability to debug JavaScript in Visual Studio 2012. If you don't want to experience the same pain then read on...

This morning when I logged on I was surprised to discover IE 10 had been installed onto my machine. I hadn't taken any action to trigger this myself and so I’m assuming that this was part of the general Windows Update mechanism. I know Microsoft had planned to push IE 10 out through this mechanism.

For just over 10 years my bread and butter has been the development and maintenance of line of business apps. More particularly, web apps built on the Microsoft stack of love (© Scott Hanselman). These sort of apps are typically accessed via the company intranet and since "bring your own device" is still a relatively new innovation these apps are invariably built for everyones favourite browser: Internet Explorer. As we all know, enterprises are generally not that speedy when it comes to upgrades. So we're basically talking IE 9 at best, but more often than not, IE 8.

My memory appears to be a sieve. Twice in the last year I've forgotten that MVCs ModelBinding doesn't handle regionalised numbers terribly well. Each time I've thought "hmmmm.... best Google that" and lo and behold come upon this post on the issue by the fantastic Phil Haack:

• Me: "It can't be done"
• Him: "Yes it can"
• Me: "No it can't"
• Him: "Yes it can, I've just done it"
• Me: "Ooooh! Show me ..."

I have put a name to my pain...​

Every now and then you think "x should be easy" - and it isn't. I had one of those situations this morning. Something I thought would take 5 minutes had me still pondering 30 minutes later. I finally cracked it (with the help of a colleague - thanks Marc!) and I wanted to note down what I did since I'm sure to forget this.

Last time I wrote about marrying up Twitter.Bootstrap.MVC4 and Bootstrap Datepicker. It came together quite nicely but when I took a more in depth look at what I'd done I discovered a problem. The brief work on regionalisation / internationalisation / localisation / globalisation / whatever it's called this week... wasn't really working. We had problems with the validation.

Updated 14/01/2013​

Since I wrote this I've taken things on a little further - to read about that go here.

TL; DR - "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."​

A good portion of any devs life is usually spent playing with APIs. If you need to integrate some other system into the system you're working on (and it's rare to come upon a situation where this doesn't happen at some point) then it's API time.

Is it 2003 again?!?​

I've just discovered Xsd.exe. It's not new. Or shiny. And in fact it's been around since .NET 1.1. Truth be told, I've been aware of it for years but up until now I've not had need of it. But now now I've investigated it a bit I've found that it, combined with the XSD/XML Schema Generator can make for a nice tool to add to the utility belt.

Granted XML has long since stopped being sexy. But if you need it, as I did recently, then this is for you.

Documenting a JsonValueProviderFactory Gotcha​

About a year ago I was involved in the migration of an ASP.NET WebForms application over to MVC 3. We'd been doing a lot of AJAX-y / Single Page Application-y things in the project and had come to the conclusion that MVC might be a slightly better fit since we intended to continue down this path.

During the migration we encountered a bug in MVC 3 concerning Dictionary deserialization. This bug has subsequently tripped me up a few more times as I failed to remember the nature of the problem correctly. So I've written the issue up here as an aide to my own lamentable memory.

A while ago I wrote about optimally serving up JavaScript in web applications. I mentioned that Microsoft had come up with a NuGet package called Microsoft ASP.NET Web Optimization which could help with that by minifying and bundling CSS and JavaScript. At the time I was wondering if I would be able to to use this package with pre-existing MVC 3 projects (given that the package had been released together with MVC 4). Happily it turns out you can. But it's not quite as straightforward as I might have liked so I've documented how to get going with this here...