Declarative dynamic ASP.NET forms A few days ago, I wrote a post dealing with literal data structures in .NET with a vague allusion to using them to do some declarative configuration duties. Well, to follow up, I’m going to show you a little bit about what I’m thinking. I’ve been really spoiled the last year or so doing Javascript, and…

IE6/compatibility view testing On a recent client project, I was working on a few simple contact info forms for donations and dues renewals. I put together some nice, clean css layouts for the form fields and proceeded to the meat of the project, which was MS CRM integration. Things were going well until it came time to do a client…

C# object literal notation I have a project coming up where I’d like to be able to write some declarative configuration in an object literal notation similar to JSON. The project is going to be written in C#, so I could embed a Javascript implementation like IronJS and just use JSON, or I could try using IronPython or some other…

Dynamic objects in C# Microsoft’s efforts toward making its .NET languages more dynamic get plenty of hype, so when I dug into using dynamic (aka expando) objects hoping to solve a few simple problems where I wanted to perform data binding on data that would only be known at runtime, I was optimistic that the new features would be just…

Is science fiction driving science reality? I recently watched the TED talk in which John Underkoffler demonstrated the three-dimensional operating system inteface designed for the movie Minority Report. I find it fascinating that Hollywood now has such high production standards, necessitated by ever-increasing audience sophistication, that it becomes easier for them to commission real research than to fake it. Video…

Distributed issue tracking I was checking out one of Zed Shaw’s latest projects, MulletDB when I realized that the project used Fossil , a source control system that I had never heard of before. As I checked around the Fossil site, I realized that this is just what I needed for a lot of my projects. I want to keep…

Developers as toolsmiths I was thinking the other day about software development when it occurred to me that as developers, we are primarily creating tools. Using tools to create tools, more specifically. There is a huge continuum of tools that we might be involved with – tools for ourselves, tools for our users, tools for generating other tools – you…

Embedding IronJS Update : This post covers an obsolete version of IronJS. For details on embedding the new stuff I have a new article here . I’m looking at alternatives to JScript for my latest project, Node.net . I cut the initial code using JScript because the level of integration with the .NET framework made it possible to keep the…

Node.net – Node.js implemented in Javascript on the .NET runtime – Update: This has gotten more attention after I posted this and I haven’t gotten around to doing another post. I started working on a v8 port of this after the initial JScript version just to see if it was feasible after I got some comments suggesting using v8 instead…

Jath – A JSON template language for XML processing On Saturday, I released a project called Jath that implements a technique for processing XML data that I have been playing with. The idea is to be able to write a concise declarative template in JSON that describes the desired Javascript object and apply the template to the source XML data.…