Inspired by Scott Hanselman's post on how he got started in programming I thought I'd shared my own tale about how it all began... I grew up the 80's just outside London. For those of you of a different vintage let me paint a picture. These were the days when "Personal Computers", as they were then styled, were taking the world by storm. Every house would be equipped with either a ZX Spectrum, a Commodore 64 or an Amstrad CPC. These were 8 bit computers which were generally plugged into the family television and spent a good portion of their time loading games like Target: Renegade from an audio cassette. But not in our house; we didn't have a computer. I remember mournfully pedalling home from friends houses on a number of occasions, glum as I compared my lot with theirs. Whereas my friends would be spending their evenings gleefully battering their keyboards as they thrashed the life out of various end-of-level bosses I was reduced to *wasting* my time reading. That's right Enid Blyton - you were second best in my head. Then one happy day (and it may have been a Christmas present although I'm not certain) our family became the proud possessors of an Amstrad CPC 6128:

I wanted to write about a JavaScript library which seems to have had very little attention so far. And that surprises me as it's

I've so named this blog post because it shamelessly borrows from the fine work of others: Sebastian Markbåge and Nathan Vonnahme. Sebastian wrote a blog post documenting a good solution to the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer DateTime problem at the tail end of last year. However, his solution didn't get me 100% of the way there when I tried to use it because of a need to support IE 8 which lead me to use Nathan Vonnahme's ISO 8601 JavaScript Date parser. I thought it was worth documenting this, hence this post, but just so I'm clear; the hard work here was done by Sebastian Markbåge and Nathan Vonnahme and not me. Consider me just a curator in this case. The original blog posts that I am drawing upon can be found here: 1. http://blog.calyptus.eu/seb/2011/12/custom-datetime-json-serialization/ and here: 2. http://n8v.enteuxis.org/2010/12/parsing-iso-8601-dates-in-javascript/

As I've started making greater use of JavaScript to give a richer GUI experience the amount of JS in my ASP.NET apps has unsurprisingly ballooned. If I'm honest, I hadn't given much consideration to the code quality of my JavaScript in the past. However, if I was going to make increasing use of it (and given the way the web is going at the moment I'd say that's a given) I didn't think this was tenable position to maintain. A friend of mine works for Coverity which is a company that provides tools for analysing code quality. I understand, from conversations with him, that their tools provide static analysis for compiled languages such as C++ / C# / Java etc. I was looking for something similar for JavaScript. Like many, I have read and loved Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts"; it is by some margin the most useful and interesting software related book I have read.So I was aware that Crockford had come up with his own JavaScript code quality tool called JSLint. JSLint is quite striking when you first encounter it:

I was recently working with my colleagues on refactoring a legacy application. We didn't have an immense amount of time available for this but the plan was to try and improve what was there as much as possible. In its initial state the application had no unit tests in place at all and so the plan was to refactor the code base in such a way as to make testing it a realistic proposition. To that end the domain layer was being heavily adjusted and the GUI was being migrated from WebForms to MVC 3. The intention was to build up a pretty solid collection of unit tests. However, as we were working on this we realised we had a problem with properties on our models with internal setters...

Updated 03/01/2013​

I've written a subsequent post which builds on the work of this original post. The new post exposes this functionality via a WCF service and can be found here.

Making PDFs from HTML​

I wanted to talk about an approach I've discovered for making PDFs directly from HTML. I realise that in these wild and crazy days of PDF.js and the like that techniques like this must seem very old hat. That said, this technique works and more importantly it solves a problem I was faced with but without forcing the users to move the "newest hottest version of X". Much as many of would love to solve problems this way, alas many corporations move slower than that and in the meantime we still have to deliver - we still have to meet requirements. Rather than just say "I did this" I thought I'd record how I got to this point in the first place. I don't know about you but I find the reasoning behind why different technical decisions get made quite an interesting topic...

Last time I wrote about WCF I was getting up and running with WCF Transport Windows authentication using NetTcpBinding in an Intranet environment. I ended up with a WCF service hosted in a Windows Service which did pretty much what the previous post name implies.

Yes the title of this post is *painfully* verbose. Sorry about that. Couple of questions for you: - Have you ever liked the way you can have base classes in C# which can then be inherited and subclassed in a different file / class

Update​

The speed of change makes fools of us all. Since I originally wrote this post all of 3 weeks ago Visual Studio 11 beta has been released and the issues I was seeking to solve have pretty much been resolved by the new innovations found therein. It's nicely detailed in @carlbergenhem's blog post: My Top 5 Visual Studio 11 Designer Improvements for ASP.NET 4.5 Development. I've left the post in place below but much of what I said (particularly with regard to Hungarian Notation) I've now moved away from. That was originally my intention anyway so that's no bad thing. The one HN artefact that I've held onto is using "$" as a prefix for jQuery objects. I think that still makes sense. I would have written my first line of JavaScript in probably 2000. It probably looked something like this: alert('hello world'). I know. Classy. As I've mentioned before it was around 2010 before I took JavaScript in any way seriously. Certainly it was then when I started to actively learn the language. Because up until this point I'd been studiously avoiding writing any JavaScript at all I'd never really given thought to forms and conventions. When I wrote any JavaScript I just used the same style and approaches as I used in my main development language (of C#). By and large I have been following the .net naming conventions which are ably explained by Pete Brown here. Over time I have started to move away from this approach. Without a deliberate intention to do so I have found myself adopting a different style for my JavaScript code as compared with anything else I write. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm completely happy with the style I'm currently using. But I find it more helpful than not and thought it might be worth talking about. It was really 2 things that started me down the road of "rolling my own" convention: dynamic typing and the lack of safety nets. Let's take each in turn....

Just recently I have been particularly needing to make use of remote / server-side validation in my ASP.NET MVC application and found that the unobtrusive way of using this seemed to be rather inadequately documented (of course it's possible that it's well documented and I just didn't find the resources). Anyway I've rambled on much longer than I intended to in this post so here's the TL;DR:

So back to JSON. For those of you that don't know JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is lightweight text based data interchange format. Rather than quote other people verbatim you can find thorough explanations of JSON here: - Introducing JSON

Update​

This post originally started out as an explanation of JSON. However as I wrote this quickly got abandoned in favour of writing about how I came to use JSON in the first place - which was through the use of Ajax. Having written a goodly amount I've now decided to move the actual JSON stuff into another post since I think Ajax is probably worth thinking about by itself rather than as an aside. So let me start at the beginning and explain how I came to use Ajax in the first place (this may take some time so please bear with me). In late 2004 I first started working on a project which I was to remain involved with (on and off) for a very long time indeed. The project was part financial reporting system and part sales incentivisation tool; it was used internally in the investment bank in which I was working. The project had been in existence for a number of years and had a web front end which at that point would been built in a combination of HTML, JavaScript, classic ASP and with a Visual Basic 6.0 back end. One of the reasons I had been brought on to the project was to help ".Net-ify" the thing and migrate it to ASP.NET and C#. I digress. The interesting thing about this app was that there were actually some quite advanced things being done with it (despite the classic ASP / VB). The users could enter trades into the system which represented actual trades that had been entered into a trading system elsewhere in the organisation. These trades would be assigned a reporting value which would be based on their various attributes. (Stay with me people this will get more interesting I *promise*.) The calculation of the reporting value was quite an in depth process and needed to be performed server-side. However, the users had decreed that it wasn't acceptable to do a full postback to the server to perform this calculation; they wanted it done "on-the-fly". Now if you asked me at the time I'd have said "can't be done". Fortunately the other people working on the project then weren't nearly so defeatist. Instead they went away and found Microsoft's webservice.htc library. For those of you that don't know this was a JavaScript library that Microsoft came up with to enable the access of Web Services on the client. Given that it was designed to work with IE 5 I suspect it was created between 1999-2001 (but I'm not certain about that). Now it came as a revelation to me but this was a JavaScript library that talked to our web services through the medium of XML. In short it was my first encounter with anything remotely Ajax-y. It was exciting! However, the possibilities of what we could do didn't actually become apparent to me for some years. It's worth saying that the way we were using webservice.htc was exceedingly simplistic and rather than investigating further I took the limited ways we were using it as indications of the limitations of Ajax and / or webservice.htc. So for a long time I thought the following: - The only way to pass multiple arguments to a web service was to package up arguments into a single string with delimiters which you could split and unpackage as your first step on the server.

So it's 2010 and I've started using jQuery. jQuery is a JavaScript library. This means that I'm writing JavaScript... Gulp! I should say that at this point in time I hated JavaScript (I have mentioned this previously). But what I know now is that I barely understood the language at all. All the JavaScript I knew was the result of copying and pasting after I'd hit "view source". I don't feel too bad about this - not because my ignorance was laudable but because I certainly wasn't alone in this. It seems that up until recently hardly anyone knew anything about JavaScript. It puzzles me now that I thought this was okay. I suppose like many people I didn't think JavaScript was capable of much and hence felt time spent researching it would be wasted. Just to illustrate where I was then, here is 2009 John's idea of some pretty "advanced" JavaScript:

What on earth is jQuery? What's a jQuery plugin?

The year was 2010 (not really that long ago I know) and the project that I was working on was sorely in need of a new grid component. It was an ASP.NET WebForms project and for some time we'd been using what was essentially a glorified datagrid which had a few extra features implemented to allow us to change column order / columns displayed / copy contents to clipboard etc. Our grid worked perfectly fine - it gave us the functionality we needed. However, it looked pretty terrible, and had some "quirky" approaches in place for supporting IE and Firefox side by side. Also, at the time we were attempting to make our app seem new and exciting again for the users. The surprising truth is that users seem to be more impressed with a visual revamp than with new or amended functionality. So I was looking for something which would make them sit up and say "oooh - isn't it pretty!". Unfortunately the nature of the organisation I was working for was not one that lended itself to paying for components. They were occasionally willing to do that but the hoops that would have to be jumped through first, the forms that would need to be signed in triplicate by people that had nearly nothing to do with the project made that an unattractive prospect. So I began my search initially looking at the various open source offerings that were around. As a minimum I was looking for something that would do what our home-grown component did already (change column order / columns displayed / copy contents to clipboard etc) but hopefully in a "nicer" way. Also, I had long been unhappy with the fact that to get our current grid to render results we did a *full postback* to the server and re-rendered the whole page. Pointless! Why should you need to do all this each time when you only wanted to refresh the data? Instead I was thinking about using an Ajax approach; a grid that could just get the data that it needed and render it to the client. This seemed to me a vastly "cleaner" solution - why update a whole screen when you only want to update a small part of it? Why not save yourself the trouble of having to ensure that all other screen controls are persisted just as you'd like them after the postback? I also thought it was probably something that would scale better as it would massively reduce the amount of data moving backwards and forwards between client and server. No need for a full page life cycle on the server each time the grid refreshes. Just simple data travelling down the pipes of web. With the above criteria in mind I set out on my Google quest for a grid. Quite soon I found that there was a component out there which seemed to do all that I wanted and far more besides. It was called jqGrid:

It started with Scott Hanselman. I had no particular plans to start a blog at all. However, I was reading Scott Hanselman's turn of the year post and I was struck with an idea.