Discussions

4 minutes ago, fanbaby wrote

*snip*

These tools (yeoman and grunt and sass and haml etc.) are build tools. They are important. If it was 90's, Microsoft would have created nyeoman, ngrunt, nsass and nhaml

Why would Microsoft have created .Net versions of tools before .Net was even invented?

And I can't really think of any tool using that naming scheme (most of them are ports of Java stuff) that was actually made by MS themselves. NAnt, NUnit, NHibernate, NDoc, etc., they were all third party projects.

2 minutes ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Well must be a cold day in hell then. Because Windows has full POSIX support, and can run the same tools as well. (it even used to ship with Windows as the POSIX subsystem  but customers didn't use it, so it got pulled into a separate product).

Note that SUA has been deprecated in Windows 8 and will be removed in the next version (though I guess the server components will remain). So if there really is such a huge demand for POSIX support in Windows, it seems Microsoft isn't seeing it.

32 minutes ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

What does POSIX have to do with web-development?

I think he's talking about tools that help with web development that only run in a *nix environment.

If the tools are mainly/only for macs, then surely POSIX compliance isn't enough to run them? Otherwise they'd work on Linux too.

2 minutes ago, MasterPie wrote

You could leave the pages as they are, but then have a /Software/{id} view, in addition to ketch's /Software/index view. Have the details view showing a lot of info about the software and have a link pointing to that software's static page.

But if I do that, I would have to have the "lot of info" in the database, which I don't really want. I'm fine with having an index generated from the DB, but I don't want to move the details pages there, especially because some of them have code behind, and adding another intermediate "details" page adds nothing.

And how do you do static pages with Razor? I want them to be able to use the global layout, so I do plan to convert the static pages to .cshtml. But it seems you can't just serve static .cshtml files without a controller serving them up as views.

I've got a question about best practices for MVC. How would you convert the Software section of my site to MVC?

Currently, they're all separate .aspx pages. Nothing here is data-driven, it's all static content. Each product has its own directory with one or more .aspx pages in it. Some of the pages do have code behind, so I can't move this stuff into the database. For some of them, the directory also contains full SDK documentation (generated by Sandcastle).

The only thing I can think of is to have a separate view for each product page, and then have the controller select the appropriate view. Alternatively, I could use one view which renders partial views for each page. The SDK docs will have to change url because if I want a controller to handle /Software I can't also have a directory by that name on the server.

This sounds incredibly hackish, though. Is there a better way to handle a scenario like this?

@kettch: Definitely. My input into the design is mostly the header, the column layout, and changing the font.

@MasterPie: Knockout was used in the public part only for the image viewer (e.g. here). It made it very easy to write the viewer (and way less code than the old version), which is nice since I don't really use my blog for images anymore (everyone who wants to see my pics is on Facebook now) so I didn't want to spend too much time to support a feature that I don't plan to really use anymore.

I also used Knockout for a bunch of stuff in the admin pages, it was very useful there.

Well, the fruits of my modest labour are now online. I'm fairly pleased with the results, considering I'm anything but a designer. The best effect is gotten on Windows 7+, because it uses Segoe UI and Segoe UI Light (it still looks okay if those aren't available though).

Only the home page and blog have been updated (I plan to do the other pages later).

As I said before, it's all MVC4 and uses jQuery, Foundation, and a little bit of Knockout (though most of that is in the admin pages which you can't see, obviously). I've tested it in IE9 and 10, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari on iOS, and IE10 on WP8. I'm pretty pleased with how nice the site works in the mobile browsers thanks to the responsive layout (a few warts notwithstanding, particularly recaptcha is just a bit too wide).

On IE8 and older, it's not such a nice story. Foundation defaults to "mobile-first", which means they get a one column view regardless of screen resolution. That wouldn't be an issue, except that means the top bar menu defaults to collapsed and cannot be opened due to script errors. So while the content is reachable, it's a * to navigate without the menu. But frankly, I don't really care about those old browsers anyway. Just upgrade already.

5 minutes ago, Heywood_J wrote

They see no reason to spend a lot of money changing their computer when what they have works and does what they need.

Unless of course that computer is a smartphone or an iPad. Then they'll happily buy a new one every year.

30 minutes ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

The kids are pretty good with their phones and W7 but W8 was a mess for everyone (including me as I got all of the complaints) until I installed Start8 and MetroMix.

My mom asked me (without any prompting from me) to uninstall those things because she wanted to use the start screen.