A few months ago, we introduced the new node.js features we've added to WebMatrix 2. One of the missing pieces from that experience was a way to manage NPM (Node Package Manager) from within the IDE.
This week we shipped the final release of WebMatrix 2, and one of the fun things that comes with it is a new extension for managing NPM. For a more complete overview of the WebMatrix 2, check out Vishal Joshi's blog post.
After releasing WebMatrix 2 RC this week, I'm excited to head out to NYC for WordCamp 2012. While I get ready to present tomorrow, I figured I would share some of the amazing work the WebMatrix team has done to create a great experience for WordPress developers. For a more complete overview of the WebMatrix 2 RC, check out Vishal Joshi's blog post.
If you want to skip all of this and just download the bits, here you go:
After months of hard work by the WebMatrix team, it's exciting to introduce the release candidate of WebMatrix 2. WebMatrix 2 includes tons of new features, but today I want to give an overview of the work we've done to enable building applications with Node.js.
If you want to skip all of this and just get a download link (it's free!), here you go.
Building asynchronous real time apps with bidirectional communication has traditionally been a very difficult thing to do. HTTP was originally designed to speak in terms of requests and responses, long before concepts of rich media, social integration, and real time communication were considered staples of modern web development. Over the years, various solutions have been hacked together to solve this problem. You can use plugins like flash or silverlight to make a true socket connection on your behalf - but not all clients support plugins. You can use long polling to manage multiple connections via HTTP - but this can be tricky to implement, and can eat up system resources. The Web Socket standard promises to give web developers a first class socket connection, but browser support is spotty and inconsistent.
Various tools across multiple stacks have been release to solve this problem, but in this post I would like to talk about the first real asynchronous client/server package for ASP.NET: SignalR. SignalR allows .NET developers to change the way we think about client/server messaging: instead of worrying about implementation details of web sockets, we can focus on the way communication flows across the various components of our applications.
Over this holiday break I had the interesting opportunity to write a bookmarklet for a friend who runs a comic based website. Instead of just manipulating the currently loaded page, the bookmarklet needed to send a list of images to another site. Often when writing bookmarklets, we tend to only think of loading our code in the context of a HTML content page. How often do you test your bookmarklets when the browser is viewing an image? In this article I am going to go through the code I used to bootstrap my bookmarklet script, and discuss some of the interesting challenges I experienced along the way.
To get started with this code, I used a fantastic article by Tommy Saylor of Smashing Magazine. It gave me a good start, but certainly left a lot of details out, and in my case, caused a lot of bugs.