Why learning CSS is important in a (web) development world

I notice that a lot of development effort is going into creating a nice back end. Creating a GUI is a matter of using the designer – better known as system.draggy-droppy – and setting the right colors via the properties panel. But lately a shift has happened which forces developers to

Posting code on your blog

Unfortunately the images to this post were lost during the migration from Blogengine.Net to WordPress If you have a technical blog it’s very important that you can somehow easily post code snippets to your blog. I was using the Visual Studio plugin Copy source as HTML for a

Testing the OnActionExecuting event of a Controller

Unfortunately the images to this post were lost during the migration from Blogengine.Net to WordPress I was doing a bit of refactoring on an ASP.NET MVC web application and was using the OnActionExecuting event in a controller to do authentication. I had not yet written a test for

VMWare Fusion vs Parallels

Unfortunately the images to this post were lost during the migration from Blogengine.Net to WordPress I have been using a Mac as my main development machine for over a year now. I have been very happy with it, you could call me an Apple fanboy. Because I develop in

Austin and Kaizenconf Part 2

Using and abusing ASP.NET MVC for fun and profit Being a huge fan of ASP.NET MVC, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see guys that are much smarter than I am show off how they use the MVC framework. Jeremy and Chad showed real code of how

Austin and Kaizenconf Part 1 - workshops

Unfortunately the images to this post were lost during the migration from Blogengine.Net to WordPress It's finally there, Jan and I departed from Belgium to Austin, Texas to attend Kaizenconf. I have been looking forward to this for quite a while. It didn’t start out good when I

Creating a menu for your ASP.NET MVC website using HTML helpers

I've been working with ASP.NET MVC for a few months and it has been quite a ride. I'm working on a website where the menu is loaded from the database. It should be rendered as an unsorted list and a CSS class should be added to the active item.

Aggiorno, the Italian colleague you’ve always wanted

Ever had someone come to your desk and saying: I have a little project for you, you should change something in our state of the art web application. After agreeing you would do the changes, you open up the solution and you see that the state of the art application

Descriptive names versus abbreviations for UI elements

I have been using abbreviations for UI elements for a long time. I think most developers have and still do. When you declare a button which will give the user the possibility to log on, it will be called: btnLogOn (or something similar). At first I wasn’t really thinking

Brazilian waxing, choosing a JavaScript framework and why I don’t like ASP.NET AJAX

Let me first clarify something. As Jan pointed out I am into Brazilian waxing but please, all you pervert guys stop sending me emails with questions about the subject! Now that's taken care of, we can get to the matter at hand. A couple of days ago, somebody asked me