In April 2011, the jQuery team announced development on the popular jQuery Templates plugin would be delayed indefinitely. In need of a replacement, I began investigating alternatives and soon discovered Underscore, the “utility belt” library behind the awesome Backbone.js framework. The Underscore library includes an easy-to-use templating feature that easily integrates with any JSON data source, so read on to learn how easy it is to create JSON-backed templates.
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In my previous posts (part 1, part 2) I showed you how to create external tools and add them to a custom tool bar. In this post we will go the next logical step and add them to the context menu, so when you right-click on a file in the solution explorer (or other places) you’re tools are right there for use.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that customizing Visual Studio in these ways is a bit cumbersome. Creating context menus are no better considering there are a ton of different menus depending on the context that you’ll have to independently configure.
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Justin Pope began his career working on standardized test score reporting systems and data warehouses for K-12 teachers. These project teams designed applications that help teachers spend more time in the classroom teaching and less time learning how to use confusing new technology. He joined the Headspring team in 2010 looking for opportunities to enhance the user experience on projects across several clients each year. When I have talked to other consultants, they all say Justin is really relied on for his unique ability to empathize with the client. Here is how our conversation about web development went: Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been writing software professionally for 9 years now, and unprofessionally for 18. My recent focus has been on C#, but I’ve worked with many languages over the years.
When I was in the 7th grade, one of the other students made a Myst clone with Hypercard using photos taken around the school. That seemed like pure magic, so I wanted to find out how software is made. Like most people who get into this subject at an early age, my goal was to make games.
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In my previous post I showed you how to configure your own External Tools in Visual Studio, such as a command that opens up the current document in an external text editor, or a tool that launches a custom deployment executable. External Tools by default are accessed through the Tools menu, but this is lame. In this post I’ll show you to create your own toolbar to contain your tools so they are no more than one click away. Read the rest of this entry »
This week I spent some time getting to know Pedro Reys, one of our Senior Consultants at Headspring. We had a great time talking about consuming technology, and what that means in the past, present and the future. While we both agreed that invention of indoor plumbing (originally my suggestion) was an important milestone in technology, the internet has ultimately surpassed any and all twenty-first century technical advancements. Here’s how the rest of our conversation went:
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I got my feet wet with unit testing during a summer internship, before the term was officially on my radar. I was writing a number-crunching library in C, and my tests took the form of short C programs using that library. They would run through several related examples and print to the console when something went wrong. It’s a shame that I was a senior in college before the concept even came up, but at least I got exposure to it before graduating and entering the workforce. This approach actually helped me to catch a pretty serious and subtle error that I wasn’t explicitly looking for. Read the rest of this entry »
Upon the suggestion of a coworker I joined 342,787 people (and counting) with a 2012 resolution to learn how to code. It’s called CodeYear, presented by CodeAcademy, supported by companies like YCombinator, and made viral by the addition of my fellow student, Michael Bloomberg. It’s a very simple, learn as you go platform, with big clean buttons and “dumbed down” explanations for the average Joe (or Jill). I get an email every Monday with a new lesson to work on for the week. As I progress, I earn badges and bragging rights to publish on Facebook and Twitter.
There are a number of courses and levels to choose from, and I have just completed the first one, “Getting Started with Programming”. After creating an account, I can sign in and access courses that I am working on and track my progress. Read the rest of this entry »
Visual Studio has some deep customization options and extensibility points that many of us just ignore. Once such option is “External Tools” which allow you to create a menu item (and optional toolbar) that can run any external program you wish.
I recently had to set up a couple of new computing environments so I went through my typical routine of setting up Explorer.exe as an external tool, and while doing so I pondered a few other tools that might be useful. In this and subsequent posts, I’ll describe how to set up some simple external tools, create a custom tool bar for them and even add them to the context menu. Read the rest of this entry »
This week’s spotlight is on Ryan Vice, one of our newest Principal Consultants at Headspring. He is currently in the final stages of authoring, MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in WPF and Silverlight. Here is our conversation:
What led to you focusing on WPF?
During my time at Money Management International, I was the Workflow lead and that position included the responsibility for both the workflow engine and the related user interface components. During that time I became active on the MSDN Workflow Foundation forums and was one of the top answerers throughout that year. This lead to me being offered a slot at Houston’s Tech Fest, which lead to blog content which then lead to me receiving Microsoft MVP award in connected systems. Once that project had wrapped up I couldn’t find any other projects on Workflow Foundation which I really enjoy and so I looked for projects in WPF which is also a XAML based WinFX technology. At the time I was looking to specialize in WinFX and continue to try and increase the level of my contributions to the development community around WinFX. Read the rest of this entry »
