Mark Newton
With HTTPWatch you can see exactly what your web application is doing When writing code for a complicated web site or web application it can be difficult to see what exactly is going on, are the web services being called correctly? Are they returning the right results? Where the performance bottlenecks might be? The questions […]
Another development tool that has caught my eye is thanks very much to a colleague, DJ who I rate as one of the most knowledgeable Java developers that I know. The other day he was expounding the virtues of Java Net Beans IDE 5.5 with the Matisse interface builder. This free open source tool has […]
So, should we ignore Flash and Silverlight and wait for HTML 5 ? Well first thing to consider that whilst the spec for HTML5 is there, it has yet to reach a full standard and also the current browsers do not support it, so I think we have a little while to wait, but it […]
Currently I am developing a web application that will work on most mobile devices, this app takes data, filters and analysis it and then presents it to the mobile user in a form that they can use to help make a buying decision. The app calls a web service which interrogates a database of information, […]
I am currently engaged in the redesign of a couple of current web sites and when it comes to a redesign it is a good time to think about any new technologies that could be employed to improve the user experience as well as future-proofing the design against any new requirements from these users and […]
It has been a busy, frustrating, yet interesting and rewarding time these last couple of months. It all started when I decided to write my own ‘Deep Zoom’ web application using Silverlight as promised in my last article. With early beta code sometimes by waiting a couple of weeks before you start to code you […]
This is the starting point for Azure On a different tack, there is lots of talk about Cloud Computing and Microsoft has announced development tools for Azure, their version. The idea with Cloud computing is that you put your application and data on interconnected third party servers in a virtual ‘Cloud’. Your application is shared […]
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, […]