Author: babak

  • A review of Themify’s Minshop theme

    Minshop is a responsive WooCommerce theme from the good people at themify.me. In building out the eCommerce solution for The Men’s Fashion, Minshop has allowed us to jump start the front end thus saving weeks of design effort and allowed us team to deliver a working product in minimal time. Responsive Layout Minshop is an HTML5 WordPress theme with […]

  • ASP.NET MVC4 Project + SQL CE 4 limitations

    With the official RTM release of Visual Studio 2012 and the MVC 4 project (also available for VS 2010), I have been using some of the features of new features and out of the box features of hte MVC 4 project to ease the development of my user stories. SQL CE 4 made database backends […]

  • Hosted source control and project management with Subversion and Team Foundation Server

    I have been using Subversion for many years both professionally and on open source projects (mainly Razor Image Viewer). Initially, I had Subversion running as a service on my local computer but the more I thought about a strategy for backing up my work, the more it made sense to use a hosted environment. The […]

  • iOS ‘native’ web apps with HTML5

    I’ve been considering iOS development recently but I don’t have a Mac on which to develop. Alternatively, I have been looking into HTML5 ‘native’ web apps. These are web apps that look and feel like native iOS applications. I am using my Batch Image Resize web app for my R&D on this topic. Installation The […]

  • Deploying an ASP.NET Web Application with SQL CE 4 & Entity Framework without installation

    Update – 12/15/2011 As of Visual Studio 2010 SP1, there’s an easier way to do everything below. In the Solution Explorer, right click the project and select ‘Add Deployable Dependencies…’, select the dependencies you want to include, and click OK. This will generate the folder _bin_deployableAssemblies with the proper DLLs. Now when you build your solution, […]

  • Login/Register page design

    I recently went to the Getty Villa website to get some tickets and came across their login/registration screen. Sadly, their page looks like the type of examples used in hyperbole-filled academic books on how NOT to design the login page. The notes defined here can be applied to most any user interface design. Consistency of […]

  • Breaking Change in Cruise Control .NET 1.6

    Building on my earlier post about Setting up Cruise Control .NET 1.5/1.6 on Windows 7 + IIS7, I have identified a breaking change with CruiseControl .NET 1.6.x. For readability, I like to place each -D flag in my <buildArgs> definition on a separate line <tasks>� <nant> <executable>$(NAntExecutablePath)</executable> <buildFile>D:cidefault.build.xml</buildFile> <buildArgs> -D:SolutionFile=”$(Batch_WorkingFolderTrunk)MySolution.sln” -D:LocalDeployRoot=D:cideployMyProject </buildArgs> <targetList> <target>build</target> </targetList> […]

  • Batch Image Resize

    I have been looking around for a method to resize multiple images in a single batch. There have been a number of downloadable tools and shell integration solutions, but I was hoping to find an online tool to do just that. Not finding a solution that I liked, I decided to build one. Take a […]

  • Client side sorting with ASP.NET GridView and jQuery TableSorter

    UPDATE If you are looking for a more complete solution including filtering, search, paging, and server side sorting, look at my post on using the datatables plugin with ASP.NET. Doing some quick data prototyping, I employed the use of the ASP.NET GridView to quickly report on my data objects. As is common, the prototypes quickly took […]

  • Email Scripting Fail

    It’s time for another Good Idea, Bad Idea (anyone remember those snips from Animaniacs back in the 90s?)! Good Idea Scripting your auto emails to personalize them and make them more likely to be read. Bad Idea Placing your script in a string literal, preventing it from executing and emailing the script text instead. This is […]