Although I know a bit about programming, there's a lot of stuff I don't know how to do. I use this process journal to document best practices as I stumble upon them, if I don't just make something up on the spot. Focus in September-October 2011 is on learning web application development.
Today I was struck, again, by just how much of a PITA it is to open up all the project folders and windows for any one of my projects. I briefly tried using batch files to do this, but they are hard to maintain. So for a change of place, I’m looking at Visual Studio 2010 and C#, to see if I can write some simple code that does this for me.
I’m not familiar with Windows Application development, but I am familiar with C# with the XNA game library, so I’m crossing my fingers. Continue reading →
Today’s pre-bedtime code exploration is using MarkItUp, a rich text control that uses jQuery. Continue reading →
One of the upcoming challenges for the task management app will be data entry. I don’t know about you, but the prospect of spending hours pecking text into text boxes and clicking “OK” buttons fills me with dread. So I’m going to implement an idea I had about dual-channel rapid input as an experiment. Continue reading →
I’m finally getting back to this. I’ve been reading articles here and there about the use of jQuery UI, trying to find a succinct reference. The source code samples on the jQuery UI demos page helped: you just invoke a method on the element you want to have a certain UI feature (e.g. sortable()). Behaviors are added magically! This is pretty cool. By using the SORTABLE features of jQueryUI, I have just saved myself at least a week of painstaking work rolling my own drag and drop code. Continue reading →
I recently posted about creating some Baseline Grid CSS for my web typography. The first iteration was hand-coded for a specific font-size and line-height. A reader mentioned that there are CSS templating engines available called LESS and SASS respectively. They both allow you to treat CSS more like a real programming language, with constants and functions and other extensions to make it suck less. SASS works on the server-side, requiring Ruby. LESS, however, runs on the client-side, and is implemented as a Javascript library that executes at runtime. There are some nice features in both packages, but I didn’t really want to require yet another Javascript library in my code or install Ruby. Continue reading →
My cousin posted a link to list.js, a 7K (minified) Javascript list control. It works with Javascript/HTML and implements a way of dynamically managing a list data structure and displaying it through a template engine. It’s a nice compendium of Javascript coding techniques too, easily readable and cross-platform.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s the implementation of a data structure that is designed to support a particular kind of HTML element. What it doesn’t do is implement a UI to manipulate the list. For that, you could look to something in jQuery UI like the Sortable functionality.
This detailed FAQ about Javascript closures is worth reading to understand the power of this mysterious concept. It doesn’t exist in other languages I’ve studied, and it’s possible to misuse. This article helps understand how the Javascript interpreter implements and uses them, which can help you avoid creating inefficient code.
SUMMARY: I can create tasks and see them on the screen. But I don’t yet have a way of saving the data back to the server. That’s what I want to work on today. Continue reading →
SUMMARY: In yesterday’s installment, I added a button that created a new Task on the server and returned the new TaskID to the client GUI. NOW I finally get to draw it on the screen using jQuery! Continue reading →
SUMMARY: I need to be able to add tasks, which means I need to add stuff to the database when I click on a button and get the result back to the GUI so I can generate a new visual task object (VTask) on the screen. Continue reading →