I'm starting to note an interesting trend.
Okay, it's obvious that I'm a software developer and, in my opinion, a good one. I spend a great deal of time learning the details behind things and love understanding how the world works a bit under the covers. When I first went into developing software I figured that those who had made a fair amount of money on the internet were also good developers who spent their time doing very much the same thing - learning, exploring, understanding, etc. I'm actually experiencing a bit of a down-time right now as I recently recieved a nice position as a senior-level ASP.NET developer for a while with a startup company in my area (good opportunity, in my opinion); and so I'm taking some time to get more a grasp on my blog, on blog marketing, etc. Therefore, I decided I would read a few blogs, take a few notes on what I should do, and just try them out....what I found was interesting.
Probably the best site I found for advice is this one: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/01/11/how-to-market-your-blog-in-2007/. The guy was very logical and concise; and the advice he gives does make sense. One of the bits of advice he gave was to register yourself with various blog directories and social site networks (what these sites do is try to promote EVERYONEs blog by just signing up, and in the process gain traction themselves). However, a few of the sites he pointed me to were having serious problems (both in their esthetics and in their function); in fact, a few of the sites were downright crappy.
Top100bloggers.com immediately gave me this:
and blog-clicker.com threw up on me with this....
From my brief experience over at rentacoder.com I learned to pick out sites that were created by a business-weasel hiring out to some college freshman for one hundred fifty bucks. It's my guess that these sites were created in just this way. Something goes wrong with the site and the owner freaks out and tries to pull the XBOX 360 paddle out of the hands of the original programmer to fix the "issue" - and what you get is, well, what you see above.
My initial, gut-instinct here is that these sites were created in a rat-race fashion.
However, a few sites weren't bad and - in fact - were downright good. I thought BlogExplosion.com was interesting....the premise here is that you gain points by visiting other people's blogs for a period of time; apparently these points credit you for some standing in their system (I'm still new to this). Also, within a brief period of time I'm already noticing a slight number of hits coming from BlogFlux. B5Media.com looks really nice, but they appear to not be accepting new people at this moment (not sure why).
Oh well. My point behind this post is that I have to quietly chuckle to myself when a site just poops all over itself when someone is trying to join it and enhance it's community; it takes me back to a few people I use to work for/with who seemed gifted at putting themselves into the "putting out fires" department because careful, concise work seemed like a waste of time. I dunno', some of the sites might actually be good and, I'm sure, sites like MySpace.com started off similarly (in fact, when I had a MySpace.com account it seemed like the darn thing was breaking nearly every five minutes). I guess what do I know....
I'm playing around with FeedBurner (finally). I updated all of the RSS links to point to feedburner's, so if anyone has any trouble reading this blog from here on out (don't ask how you'd see this post if you were, but I'm doing my bit), please let me know. Thanks.
I'm going to go out on a limb here because I'm going to make it well known that I don't understand the craze behind the iPhone. I can appreciate the look and appeal of it to a degree, because I can understand that technology is cool and that Apple, with their interface, makes interacting with it different (therefore "cool" in the eyes of many); but what I cannot understand is the foaming-at-the-mouth for features that have already exist in other phones (like my iMate).
For example - PopCap recently announced that they're bringing out a version of Bejeweled just for the iPhone (you can read more about it here). To me this isn't news - this is almost sad that some find it even newsworthy. How long has that game been around and how long have I been able to play it on my smart phone? To make matters worse - you have to leverage Safari as the sole platform for developing applications for the iPhone. I just recently purchased Age of Empires for my phone so that I had something to play during my transatlantic flight to Italy - can that be done on the iPhone? Well, if it's all browser-based certainly it cannot (and can you imagine the minutes charged to my phone had I done it WHILE in Europe?). I'll admit I'm not sure of the physics behind how the iPhone plays the game, it's possible (quite possible) that it exists in some sort of cache on the phone, but - still - I would really like to see the implementation of something like Age of Empires in the Safari browser on the iPhone.
Plus, what's up with no flash?
Trust me, I definitely understand and appreciate the power of Web 2.0 and the new mindsight of moving tradiational, desktop applications over to the web (for quite a while that has been the point of many posts on this blog), but to me it seems like Jobs basically cut out of the iPhone a major feature and, through his legions, turned it around to something to marvel at.
If nothing else this reminds me of the time I got into a debate regarding PPC vs. Intel with a relative of mine. Months before Apple started the Intel transition he was tossing his hands about as to how great PPC was over Intel - a month after the transition started he was telling me how great Intel was. Seriously - I don't get it!
I have an interest into going into detail over the serialization framework provided by ASP.NET AJAX. The reason - ultimately - is that I would like to start explaining how the Animation framework works in ASP.NET AJAX. However, as with any sort of understanding, there are earlier pieces that must be grasped first before you can truly understand the later pieces: the "crawl before you walk" problem. So, let's start off with the basics and, over the next couple days, we'll move our way through the serialization framework and into the Animation framework of ASP.NET AJAX. Doing so, you'll be able to really start cooking with some fascinating animations in your browser-side programming. My goal, also, is to aid you in understanding how it all works under the hood (as usual).
So, let's explore JSON.
JSON - the JavaScript Object Notation - is a "stringified" version of an object; or an object represented as human-readable text. It is valuable because the web, primarily, doesn't do well with raw, binary data....as you know, the data must be encoded so that it can be properly transmitted via the web medium (learn more). However, it is more space-savvy then various alternatives (such as XML), thereby making it more appealing to transmit large, detailed blocks of data (such as objects).
The basic idea behind JSON is that when you need to transmit some object over the web boundary, you serialize it in the JSON wire-format, make the transmission, and then deserialize it on the receiving end into the original object. The result is a clean hand-off of the object from one universe to another across the finicky web. The actual data format isn't important; though if you are interested Wikipedia has a nice overview of it here. But, suffice it to say that in JSON, you're taking some opaque object and representing it as a block of ASCII-based text.
Why is it important?
In ASP.NET AJAX, especially, JSON is VERY important. Why? Because ASP.NET AJAX is striving, very hard, to be as strongly-typed as it can at all times for objects written in ECMA script. Objects are flittering and flying about all over the ASP.NET AJAX world and, therefore, a consistent wire-format for transmitting and working with those objects is necessary. As we will see when we start encountering the Animation framework of ASP.NET AJAX, serialization via JSON is used extensively in converting the animation XML into maleable, server-side objects that we may program against; likewise, those same objects on the server can be serialized into meaningful JavaScript objects for the client-side framework. All of this is done using JSON formatting in ASP.NET AJAX.
How does it work?
I mentioned earlier that the formatting rules of JSON isn't important - and for us, as ASP.NET AJAX programmers - it isn't. The reason is due to the fact that we rarely ever need to hand-tweak anything because formatters for JSON exist and are quite mature already, on both the client AND the server-sides. However, there is a powerful framework at work here that deserves a bit of understanding, regardless of the actual formatting rules.
At the core, the most important element required for JSON serialization within the browser itself is the eval() method. The eval() method takes a block of data, which can be either script or JSON data, and evaluates it. The "evaluation" process will do something to the text; if it's script, then it will execute it, otherwise it will go through and parse out the JSON data and return a deseralized object back to the script. There are security implications involved in this sort of process, and so you should be very cautious to leverage eval() on your own. Instead, you should use Sys.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer as an ASP.NET AJAX developer. This type exposes two, obvious methods: serialize() and deserialize(). Under the hood, this JavaScriptSerializer object leverages eval(), but more cautiously.
So, JSON works by leveraging API frameworks that convert the formatted data to objects and back again for us.
Conclusion
In the next part of this topic I'll go over the actual process of taking objects represented in XML and creating ECMA script from them (and back again); a process that is used extensively in the Animation framework of ASP.NET AJAX to work with the animation objects declaratively.
Lately I've started becoming more
and more interested in the business side of social networking - its effects on
business, marketing and the like; it's really quite a fascinating social
phenomenon. I think I’ve always had an
interest in a number of things in my life – obviously software development (the
under-the-hood, nuts and bolts, creative pursuit of developing a solution to a
problem) has always been a major interest, but so has business. Due to the fact that the world is starting to
catch up to the fact that computers are “cool” and, therefore, my investment in
them has become more marketable and social, my interest in business has grown
even further; now to the point where I think I might start blogging on not only
topics related to .NET development, but also the business applications of that
development in many areas.
Personally I think the next big “wave”
in the world of business is going to be in how it leverages the new social
medium to reach, interact with, and learn from customers (current or
potential). I think, in many ways, this has already started – companies like Microsoft,
Sun and even McDonalds are using RSS in some form or another to reach out to
their customers (their communities). It’s all just very fascinating and I think
that if we – as developers – can keep our eye on this new and interesting market,
we might be able to all profit from it highly. Remember that we have a power
that those who pay us do not; if we watch over their shoulders and keep our
focus one step ahead, we can be the ones cutting the paychecks.
Anyway –
if I write enough on this topic I might create a separate blog dedicated to
just that so that the focus here doesn’t drift too much. I guarantee I have
plenty to write out in the future in .NET development, but I also promise there’s
going to be a lot more on the practical applications of that development.
I'm going to be on a cruise in the Mediterranean next week - so I won't be posting :P I'll try to take some nice pictures and show them here when I get back. Have a great week everyone.
Please Note: You must enable Script Debugging in Internet Explorer in order to follow what you are about to see here. Please do this!
Also.....Beta-1 warning here - things will change. I find it very interesting to watch how our development environments have changed over the past few years; I remember a long, long time ago writing an entry about doing debugging of javascript in Visual Studio 2003. In any case, I really think I would like to walk everyone here through doing this in the new Visual Studio 9. One of the coolest parts of Visual Studio 9 is the intellisense feature that you get with JavaScript. Therefore, let's do some intellisense and script debugging of ASP.NET AJAX client code through the new Visual Studio 9. To start, I create a new web solution in VS 9 and add a reference to System.Web.Extensions (for ASP.NET AJAX). I then want to add my ScriptManager control to the page, followed by a HTML button that I will execute some custom ASP.NET AJAX client script on a HTML textbox. The end result looks like this:
 Next, I hook up an event handler in JavaScript with the button by double clicking it and getting presented with a method body:  In the spirit of ASP.NET AJAX being "asynchronous" I will then code into it a WebRequest class that will make an asynchronous call to any URL that is placed within the textbox. As you can see below, I have full intellisense making the use of the Sys.Net.WebRequest class a breeze:  I will then complete my use of the WebRequest class. I run into a bug, however - some null reference exception in my nicely formatted, intellisensified code. The code looks alright from the outside, it looks like this:  ...but yet in the browser I get an error whenever I try to click the button, regardless of what I have in the textbox. So, let's set a debug break point on the text I'm about to pass into the set_url method and see what happens:  It says requestURI is null. So, I must have screwed up somewhere in my code?!? So, I look back on my code and realize I'm using the 'nodeValue' property instead of the 'value' property. A quick change of the code and I now get the following:  Slick, huh? Oh, and please note that even though I'm using "cnn.com" here, you won't be able to unless you are actually hosted on cnn.com. To prevent malicious scripting, you can only cause an asynchronous request to your own domain through ASP.NET AJAX.
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