Website Outage

The website was offline for a few hours this morning due to a power outage at Fasthosts – who are the current registrars for the onthefencedevelopment domain. I say ‘current’ registrars because while the outage was due to circumstances beyond their control the fact that it took ALL of their systems offline is cause for concern.

2014 – The Year of the Mobile?

I’ve always said that when it comes to software development, you have to “pick your fights” – it’s just not possible to keep up with the ever-changing technologies. We only have so much time to spend learning new technologies and techniques so it is important to carefully consider what to focus on and what to let pass us by.

When it comes to Mobile development I have released a simple, native, Android app which was written using my somewhat rusty Java skills. At the time of writing the app is installed on around 5000 devices (if Google Play is to be believed). Since it’s original release I have addressed bugs and added a few requested features but I found it to be a bit of a struggle due to Java not being my main development language – but I simply don’t have time to bring my Java skills up to the required level. As for iPhone/iPad development I have joked that “I don’t have enough time left in my life to learn Objective C “.

Looking forward – building Android apps using C#

So, mobile is where it’s at, or at least that’s what we are told and there is plenty of evidence to back it up. I know from how much I use my Android phone and how much I rely on it that it is a development platform that can’t be ignored. As you may or may not know I currently have an app in the Android Play Store and while it’s pretty simple in what it does it has had over 5000 downloads and has a rating of about 4.5 stars. But nothing in development stands still and it already looks dated, uses the old Google Maps API and contains a reasonable amount of code that I’m not happy with. The problem is that I’m a .NET developer and while I have developed with Java in the past it too has moved on and I constantly find myself Googling for solutions to problems I know how to address in C#. So when I saw that there was a tool that would allow me to write native Android applications using C# I thought – “What’s not to like?”.

Validating Start/End Dates with Fluent Validation for MVC 4

In my current contract I needed to add date filtering to a grid of search results in and MVC view – how hard could it be? Well the filtering was the easy bit, validating the user input proved to be much more problematic. The view that I had contained, among other things, a couple of fields for Start and End Date where the user would select the dates using a jQuery date picker. I knew that I could rely on standard MVC validation to make sure that the user had entered a valid date, but how do I ensure that they have entered an End Date that falls AFTER the Start Date? This simple requirement is not something that can be acheived with the standard Data Annotation attributes but I was lucky as the project already had made use of the FluentValidation extension.

Discovering T4MVC – Replacing Literal Strings with Strongly Typed Helpers

One of the things I love about working as a contractor is getting exposure to technologies, tools and utilities that will improve my coding and help me produce better code – geeky but true. My most recent contract is no exception and this time I’ve decided to share this little gem of an extension which will remove those pesky literal string from your MVC Views.