Mark Newton
I watched a video the other day about a new web development tool which made my jaw drop. Although the video was nearly an hour long I watched it twice to make sure I was seeing it correctly. Its name? LightSwitch (http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch ). It creates Silverlight apps, geddit? I then downloaded it to my poor over […]
Before leaving for Verona I was fortunate to be invited to a Microsoft launch of their Expressions range of products. Interestingly, they decided to launch these in front of an invited audience of designers rather than developers. Interesting, because traditionally Microsoft have had very little to offer designers, that marketplace being the domain of Adobe […]
In a previous article I wrote about the problems of giving clients a way of extracting data from their web site onto their office machines. For example you have people registering on a web site and your client wants to load these people into their office database. There are several ways you might achieve this, […]
One of my favourite development tools, particularly for writing CSS is Microsoft Expression for Web, so I was saddened the other day to see that Microsoft have stopped development and support of this and most of the other products in the Expression suite (http://www.microsoft.com/expression/eng ) . Currently these are all being offered as free downloads and […]
In my last article I wrote, I spoke about HTML5 and some of the new features contained in it. Since then Apple have launched a mini site with some examples of the new things that you can do with HTML5 (http://www.apple.com/html5/ ). According to Apple Safari is the only HTML5 browser. I think not! This apparently […]
I had an interesting problem a couple of weeks ago, a web site that we had written some years ago had become the target of the spammers. A simple web page on the site enabled users to request further information and this had worked fine for years but recently the customer started getting a large […]
The big news from Microsoft has obviously been the release of Windows 8 and their tablet device. This new operating system heavily uses touch as a way of interacting between the user and the apps, and while there are and still will be traditional Windows applications there has already been a major shift in the […]
I guess for anyone working with web application development using Microsoft technologies the recent announcement of the firming up of their ‘Atlas’ extensions for Visual Studio is going to be of interest. These very beta add ins to Visual Studio enabled the developer to start to do some development with Ajax technologies. There were limitations […]
WebSockets could be a very important extension to the HTML 5 specification. Yesterday Microsoft announced another update to their HTML 5 WebSockets prototype (http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/prototypes/websockets/websockets/info). This may not seem of any great significance until you realise just what WebSockets can bring to your web application. Imagine the scenario where you have constantly changing data that you […]
There are times in the life of a web designer / application programmer when, because of either the client’s requests or the setup of the hosting web server, that they are forced to program for a technology which would not be their first choice. Nothing would make me use Access on a web site; let’s […]