Project 31-A

I caught this blog post, The Tyranny of the Urgent , via IEEE. It happen to resonate with some recent reflections on the plus and minus of Continuous Deployment or Continuous Integration . Jim cites “Agile development easily devolves into management by crisis.”   I have observed that being agile and delivering quickly tend to deliver superficial products. Products that are then reworked, and reworked, and reworked. At one extreme, you have waterfall development which results in absolutely detailed plans that are difficult to adjust. At the other extreme, agile has been been taken by some into a gospel of immediate execution.  All of the troops get up and charge across the open field. Yes, the objective may be taken but there is often a high body count, a wasteful body count.   Recently I talked to a neuropsychologist who have treated many many battle causalities from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and many start-ups. Unlike the US Marines, with “no man left behind”, c...

In my last post I successfully installed the Kindle driver as an Android Debug Bridge (adb) device. My Motorola Droid was not recognized as an adb device – and for one application that I am planning to do, I need GPS. So once more into the world of partially correct forum posts. First item to check was to insure that adb was enabled on the device!  It turned out that I had not enabled it (I had enabled Unknown Sources). When I connected the USB after changing the adb setting, I received a driver error. The phone now shows as a Drive (G:\) only instead of MTP USB Device .  One step forward, half a step back. I decided to just double check that the adb is not working… so at the command line, What! It’s there. The device ID is different from the Kindle. This was a mercifully short post.  If I had not double checked, I could easily gone down a rabbit hole trying to get something looking like a phone showing up in the device manager. A rabbit hole ...

,I’ve started to play with Appcelerator because it is effectively a cross-platform development platform for Droid, HTML5 and iOS. About two years ago I had done some Droid development just using the SDK. I have encountered a few frustrations and have not been pleased with the load time for the Droid Emulator on a Windows-7 x64 box with quad cores and 10 gigs of memory. For some simple applications, I have drunk a cup of coffee in the time that it took to build and launch in the emulator.   My traditional “magical chant” to get rid of technical frustrations is to start documenting. Often the process of documentation result in discovering skipped tests or alternative paths that could be needed.   Steps Download Titanium from http://www.appcelerator.com/ . Large download. I ended up having to re-install it to C:\Titanium , it appears that having a space in various paths results in problems according to forums. Doing this resolved some build issues and set a pattern t...

Introduction The project required the need to put the visual pie chart on a web page on the client and in a Pdf file created on the server. I eventually choose to use a Telerik Kendo DataViz Chart control on the client, and use a PNG file on the server for the Pdf file. This blog post will explain the process and code to convert the client-side pie chart Svg data to a Png file, and provide a download to the working code. Prerequisites You need to have a trial version of the Telerik Kendo library installed in order to make the sample code work. You also need InkScape installed. InkScape is the application that does the actual conversion. You will need to change the Web.config appSetting of “ExeDirectoryForInkscape” to represent your own installation location. Any SVG Data Will Work The pie chart was created using the Telerik Kendo DataViz chart control. While I name a specific control, as long as you have access to the SVG data, the same conversion process on the server will...

Introduction Recently, I needed to restyle an HTML <SELECT> box so that the selected element had a different background color. In all other ways, the element could be exactly like an HTML <SELECT>. Below are both the original element, and the restyled element.     This type of style change allows the novice user to immediately identify the control’s implied usage while allowing for some coordination with the site and page’s overall style.   Technology Platform The project is an Asp.net MVC site with jQuery, and Knockout.js on the front-end requesting json content on the backend. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ve stripped down the functionality so that just the required elements are visible. The project was already using Telerik Kendo controls so morphing the Kendo Panel Bar into a <SELECT> element was suggested. The main work is in the css file but the entire working sample project is available for download.   Telerik ...

This blog post by Wayne Berry shows how to migrating your Windows Azure SQL Database Using Data-Tier Application Framework (DacFX) Technology to an on-premise SQL Server. With the Window Azure Portal, you can easily create a Data-Tier Application logical backup package (BACPAC), store it to your Windows Azure Blog Storage; and then, using SQL Server Management Studio 2012, you can import that package to your local database server. Read: Migrating your Windows Azure SQL Database Using Data-Tier Application Framework (DacFX) Technology {6230289B-5BEE-409e-932A-2F01FA407A92}

Introduction While developing a web page with a summary graph and a detail grid below, I needed to pass a small amount of data outside of the existing Json call data sets. I also wanted to do this without another asynchronous call back to the server. I wound up stuffing the data in a custom http response header while already on the server. This article explains how I retrieved the data on the client. Existing Client Libraries Both the graph and the grid were independent jQuery libraries with very specific Json response requirements. Stuffing the small amount of data in one of those response data sets could have been done with enough tinkering but I wasn’t sure how this would affect those libraries now or in future versions. While the data was related, it was also separate and I wanted the code design to reflect that. Server Http Response Stuffing This project uses Asp.Net MVC 4. The code to add the small amount of data should be the same across the .Net platform: HttpCon...