I found a great mobile open source API that can give me a great advantage in order to convert web application into a mobile application.

The web application development should be using HTML5 and pure JavaScript and by very simple steps using the PhoneGap you can simply create your mobile application.

PhoneGap gives abilities and great features that could leverage your application according the device (OS) supported features like the following usages:

1. Camera
2. Phone Contacts
3. Media
4. Storage
5. Etc…

You can full tutorials, examples and abilities here on their website.

One more great thing is you can develop you application just like a regular web application that interacts with remote server or a specific DB that sits on your web server. In order to count on your WIFI internet connection and to enable your application from anywhere, there are great Data Plans for iPad/ iPhone etc…

I found great data plan with O2; You can find the specific details under their website here: http://www.o2.co.uk/broadband/ipad-tariff-data-plans and “be free” to check and use your mobile application from anywhere on your iPad or iPhone…

I am getting into HTML 5 lately and a result of some investigations and querying the web in order to find great helpers, tools and open source frameworks, I bumped into the Modernizr.

This is a great open-source JavaScript library that helps you build the next generation of HTML5 and CSS3-powered websites.

The Modernizr (in simple words), helps you to find out which elements or features are being supported by each major browser.

Some of the features and behavior according the official website:

Modernizr aims to bring an end to the UA sniffing practice. Using feature detection is a more reliable mechanic to establish what you can and cannot do in the current browser, and Modernizr makes it convenient for you in a variety of ways:

1. It tests for over 40 next-generation features, all in a matter of milliseconds
2. It creates a JavaScript object (named Modernizr) that contains the results of these tests as boolean properties
3. It adds classes to the html element that explain precisely what features are and are not natively supported
4. It provides a script loader so you can pull in polyfills to backfill functionality in old browsers.

Did you ever get from your graphic designer a request to build a website of a web application according to his/her design including the strange (but nice and designed) font called “Myriad Pro” or some else non supported fonts by the common browser?!?

The common answer that I've responded always is: “Let go for Arial or Verdana – it’s supported by all browsers!!, or if you want let’s put an image text with your design – but remember it will affect SEO badly…!”

It seems that there is a beautiful solution for this “problem” which let you the ability to render every kind of font in the world in your website in order to get special, clean and “other” font layout.

The free online solution for this scenario is typeface.js. This solution let you upload your font declaration file into their website and the output will be a JavaScript file that hold all declarations of how to render the special non supported fonts.

Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site's graphic text in the font you want, you can use this solution and write in plain HTML and CSS.

I recommend to give it a try – I did!

http://typeface.neocracy.org/

Is it seems to be that Microsoft is going to let developers use an open source in order to build Windows 8 applications?

I read a post on TNW that says Microsoft is going to do so – this approach will be called “New Windows” and will let an easy way to develop mobile and desktop apps using traditional JavaScript and HTML 5 for the UI layer.

It is important to say that Silverlight wasn’t mentioned in the Microsoft enouncement…!!!

I think that these are great news, which will open doors not only developers of all kinds (not only .Net developers and MS dedicated technologies developers), but to all “kinds” of developers.

I bumped into a nice solution that enables you to speed up your websites pages loading.

“Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe”.

I think that this is a good solution for those who doesn’t familiar with the advanced caching solutions or for beginner or not pro developers which want a way to increase performance, but if you are an experienced developer you should get your own solutions coding them under your application like: caching,  load balancer solutions for large website etc…

you get get some more information here.

IIS is built on an open and modular architecture that allows you customize and add new features through free IIS Extensions.

on the following link here, you can find in the iis.net official site all the IIS extensions in order to install it on you server or local IIS.

The IIS team always adding new features to IIS to help you optimize your website for search, serve media to multiple platforms and devices, deploy web applications, route URL requests and more!

Some of the current extensions are (and of course you can read about them on their site):

1. FTP Publishing Service – content publishing utility that help you do it more securely and easy
2. Web Deployment Tool – This tool simplifies the migration, management and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications and Web sites.
3. URL Rewrite - IIS URL Rewrite 2.0 enables Web administrators to create powerful rules to implement URLs that are easier for users to remember and easier for search engines to find.
4. etc…

Common Problem:

Popups are being blocked on browsers when the window is opened asynchronously. For example, needing to do some action on server before opening the window popup.

Since the window is not opened right after the user initiative, the window is being blocked.

The Solution:

1. Opening the window with empty URL and give the window a name. window.open("", name, WindowProperties);
2. Asynchronously do the round trip to the server and request for data calculation or some server actions.
3. When returning to client, refreshing the opened window by calling window.open again with the relevant URL and the same window name. window.open(url, name, WindowProperties);

.NET Framework 4 offers great multi threads tools and new API to handle the usage of it. One of them is the Parallel.Foreach method, which executes a foreach (For Each in Visual Basic) operation in which iterations may run in parallel. (You can see a good example of usage here on the MSDN website).

This method “makes life easy” in order to enable data parallelism over any System.Collections.IEnumerable or System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<T> data source.

On the other side, I am still working and maintaining some projects that had been coded using .NET 3 (C# 3.5) and in order to perform multi-threading processes there is a need to use some other complex API and manage it, such as: ThreadPool (in order to manage a pool of threads that can be used to post work items, process asynchronous I/O, wait on behalf of other threads, and process timers), WaitHandle which encapsulates operating system–specific objects that wait for exclusive access to shared resources, etc…

While reading some tech posts lately, I bumped into a great post that outline an implementation of this Parallel.Foreach method. You can find it in the link below and I think that it could make your life much more easier in order to perform and take advantage of multi-core processors and execute foreach loops in parallel.

Get it from here.

Hi,

Scott Guthrie revealed these days the IIS Express that comes along the VS 2010 Service Pack 1.

I found very good things and improvements under this SP, but no doubt IIS Express is the best one of all the improvements list.

IIS Express is coming to replace the ASP.NET Development Server that enables you a local (VS env) we application hosting in order to server your ASP.NET code application.

The major improvements are:

• It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install)
• It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio
• It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules
• It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support
• It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all)
• It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms

My best one is the SSL support improvement. IIS Express enables you to provide an SSL based application and doesn’t ask you to install the SSL certificate because it uses the self signed certificate that comes with the IIS Express setup.

More details here.