Realtime persistant Client/Server connections with SignalR and ASP.NET

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Liam

I recently started reading about SignalR, which allows for realtime client/server programming (something I was quite excited about).  I noticed almost all of the examples on the web were done using c# and MVC so I decided to have a go myself using VB.NET and Web Forms based on a post by Scott Hanselman here.

I have purposely not added or expanded on the code so that it can be used as a simple starter point for others to use as a base or learn from.  Again another thing I noticed in samples is there was so much going on it was easy to get lost.

The result can be seen at http://forb.mooo.com/chat/ and you can Download My Visual Studio solution here

There are much more complex samples on the official site which should be delved into to see how to handle specifics such as sending messages to specific clients etc.  As you can see though this technology opens the door for some truly impressive and scale-able realtime solutions!  It also seems to work really well with mobiles as well from the brief testing I have done.



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PhoneGap 1.0 Released!

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Liam

PhoneGap has finally reached version 1.0! For those who haven’t heard of PhoneGap (where have you been hiding!), it is an open source platform that allows for the deployment of HTML 5 apps across multiple mobile platforms. The apps can be released to the respective app stores and the common API allows for access to each devices underlying hardware features.

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WordPress Free Hosting!

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Liam

Want free high preformance free hosting with no ads for your wordpress.org blog or websites?  Well read on…

It has been a few years since I have tested the various free web hosts available, and by and large they were all pretty rubbish back then, so I decided to revisit the free hosting scene and see what was on offer.

The truth is that nothing much has changed, and almost all of the free hosts I tried had some critical features missing or were just plain slow.  That was until I tried www.000webhost.com, I had tried them years ago actually as I found out when I tried to create an account, but found out I already had one!  I did a quick google search and found plenty of bad reviews, but not to be deterred I set about using their control panel to creata a mysql database for WP and see how things would turn out…

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jQuery to open all external links in a new window/tab

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Liam

A lot of times clients never want a user to leave their page when they click a link to an external site and would prefer to have the page open in a new tab. The manual way of doing this is to add the target=”_blank” attribute to each link individually. A much simpler way would be to add the following code into your template/master page which will cause all links beginning with http to open in a new tab.

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("body a[href^='http://']").attr("target","_blank");
});


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Best Web Development Extensions For Google Chrome

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Liam

chrome web store logoIf your like me, you spend a lot of time browser hopping during development. I tend to prefer Chrome for its sheer speed for browsing, and Firefox for Firebug and the related firebug extensions and last and unfortunatly not least I use IE to make sure the IE users are seeing what the rest of us are… Recently I decided it was time to give Chrome’s extensions a look over in particular the web development and SEO extensions to see if they had anything to offer in comparison to Firefox’s established stable.

I was quite surprised by how good some of them actually were, here is a list of the ones I am currently using.

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