This was Valiocon 2016

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be able to attend Valiocon 2016 for the first time. Although I've attended quite a few developer conferences with deep technical talks, this was my first designer-oriented conference. We flew out to sunny San Diego to get inspired by the great

Show Load Time Of A Page With ASP.Net Web Forms

A little heads up, this solution will not work if you have an ASP.Net AJAX UpdatePanel on your page. The javascript which is loaded by ASP.Net AJAX will throw an error. Of course you're better off throwing out ASP.Net AJAX and just use plain AJAX calls. But

Getting Error MSB3086: Task could not find sgen.exe using the SdkToolsPath when building .Net 4.0 solution with TeamCity 8.0

There are those errors that can really ruin your day. And when you search Google for a solution, the only ones you get are for software versions of a few years ago. With this post I want to make sure I'll remember the solution in the future and hopefully others

A Design Pattern A Day: The Singleton Pattern

The Singleton pattern, probably the most hated pattern on the internet. But for the sake of being complete I feel obligated in implementing it once. And never use it again. Although this pattern has its use cases in some scenario’s. Caching could be one of them. Mind the usage

A Design Pattern A Day: The Decorator Pattern

Last week I started reading the Gang Of Four book for about the fifth time. Unfortunately I’m really bad at reading reference-like books. I always get bored after reading a few design patterns and put the book on my shelf to collect dust again. This time I’ve decided

Starting a project with Express, node.js and Stylus

Node.js gets a lot of attention lately, out of curiosity I decided to try it out. After reading the excellent hands-on node e-book I wanted to port one of my pet projects, a price comparer between different IKEA branches (site is offline) written in ASP.Net MVC to node.

Using an anonymous object as the model for your Spark view

Well another post about Spark, I’ve been spending a couple of hours with the library and I really like it. On one of my previous posts Byron Sommardahl asked if it was possible to use an anonymous object as the model of your Spark view. I proposed a solution

Spark HTML generation fails: View source file not found

I use Spark as engine to generate all sorts of HTML but on Monday last week that specific code snippet failed without being changed. Spark indicated that it could not find the view file, so I checked and double checked that the view was in the correct place. This was

Using spark as a html/text rendering engine

I can't remember a project which I worked on that didn't have a requirement which included sending out emails. Most of the time the templates that are needed for these emails are so small that a simple text file with some wildcards does the trick. It does the trick but

A Kindle DX or an iPad?

I love reading technical books, more than blog posts. They give you a better and deep insight in the matter you're reading about. The big problem is that, at best, these books are relevant for a few years and then can be thrown out. In January of this year Amazon