Academic papers can be quite densely formatted. Using best practices for writing on the web could help increase readability and scannability for a wider audience. Continue reading
Tweaking our Nancy unit tests to run in 5 minutes instead of 40
Our product has over 4300 tests. The server side UI tests are around 1500 in total but was causing the full test run to take 20 minutes. Recently adding only a handful of tests increased the total test run time to over 40 minutes. It turns out the useful Browser
testing component from the Nancy framework was expensive to create for each of our 1500 server side UI unit tests. Changing our Browser and bootstrapper configuration to run once per suite rather than once per test, resulted in our total test time being reduced to just over 5 minutes! That saving was worth the trade-offs we had to make. Continue reading
HTTPS on this site
Not blogged here for what seems like an eternity! Finally got round to enabling HTTPS everywhere for this site. It was quite simple thanks to Dreamhost’s support for Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. Once that was enabled, the site supported both … Continue reading
Special offer: My Ext.NET book for $5 until 8th Jan 2016
Hi. Just a note that Packt Publishing, the publisher of my Ext.NET Web Application Development book, is running a massive sale campaign. All books, including mine, at $5 (in UK it is £4) until 8th Jan 2016. Get it here. … Continue reading
Ext.NET Ajax Requests: MVC, Web API or ASHX?
When I wrote the book on Ext.NET 2, I often described using ASHX or MVC Controllers (amongst other techniques) for getting data from Ext.NET Stores via AJAX Proxies.
Recently, I’ve received a few questions — and wondered myself — whether to use Web API instead. It has a cleaner method signature, and is intended for this kind of scenario where you want to return data rather than HTML.
I finally got a moment to compare all three (for my scenario). Continue reading
SignalR with Ext.NET
I’ve just written a post on the Ext.NET blog site looking at how you can use SignalR with Ext.NET
Ext JS TabPanel plugin for draggable tabs
Ext JS 4 comes with a plugin for TabPanels to allow reordering tabs using drag and drop. There isn’t an equivalent for Ext JS 3, however.
I came across a useful extension of the Ext JS 3.x TabPanel to re-order tabs via drag and drop. It is implemented as a subclass of Ext.TabPanel, as Ext.ux.panel.DDTabPanel and a version of it includes a useful reorder event that is fired once a tab is dragged to a new position in the TabPanel.
I refactored it from a subclass of Ext.TabPanel to a plugin so the original functionality is unchanged. See a demo and get the code. Continue reading
Ext.NET 2 Released plus Ext.NET Book Discount
Ext.NET 2 has officially been released. They also asked me to write a post on their blog about the book, which they are promoting more heavily. Finally, some details about discount codes for the Ext.NET book if you want to purchase it separately. Continue reading
Book: Ext.NET Web Application Development
My book, Ext.NET Web Application Development has just been published by Packt Publishing.
The reviewers were none other than the Ext.NET team itself. They were excited about and dedicated to this book which would not have amounted to much without their involvement. They are also offering free copies with any purchases of Ext.NET!
Blog restart
Apart from a handful of posts in 2010 and 2009 I haven’t really blogged much since 2008. Unfortunately it has been a bad combination of a number of personal tragedies, being too busy at work, and lack of spare time.
I am hoping I am through the worst of it now, and might see if I can restart this blog.