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tl;dr Ghost is a blogging platform well worth considering if your blog is all about development. I’ve been having some gripes with WordPress as a platform for blogging lately. For development focused blogs like this one, there are some things about it that make writing posts just a little bit clunky. For example: Syntax Higlightling is always going to use plugins with various shortcode formats. This works, but your raw blog text becomes quite specific to a certain implementation.

In this series of articles I’m going to be working with AngularJS, a fantastic framework from Google that helps you rapidly build web applications. We’ll see how AngularJS can be used to speed up your development and help you write cleaner, more testable code. Introducing AngularJS First of all an introduction is in order. AngularJS is a lightweight JavaScript framework, primarily for building single page web applications. The idea behind applications like these is that rather than the ’traditional’ way of writing web applications which would involve using server side technologies to render the user interface and send it to the user, we handle all of the presentation logic on the client side.

tl;dr - vsix-tools fixes the ‘Invalid Multiple Files in VSIX’ issue on the Visual Studio Gallery and lets you set vsix version numbers with Powershell. I maintain a reasonably large project called SharpGL. This project contains two Vsix packages (Visual Studio Extensions), each of which contains project templates for Visual Studio. If you have ever worked with Vsix files before you might have noticed that the tools for them in Visual Studio seem a little flaky - but even more so is that Visual Studio Gallery site that you have to use to upload your extensions.

I’m going to be working in F# almost exclusively for a short while, so before I throw myself into that I wanted to wind up my Practical AngularJS Part 2 article. It’s ready to rock here: Practical AngularJS Part 2 - Components of an AngularJS Application In this article we get a brief introduction to what’s in the toolkit for an angular developers - filters, controllers, services, directives, views and routes.

Langton’s Ant is a great simulation to write to play with a language. Just today I’ve completed my Langton’s Ant write up and published it on the CodeProject, you can see the article at Learn JavaScript Part 3 - Angularjs and Langton’s Ant. There are some interesting things in the article for angular too - a look at using directives for custom elements, how to handle both the DOM and Angular loading correctly, and timers and intervals.

A superb article by Colin Eberhardt has just been published on the CodeProject, called ‘Understanding JavaScript Object Creation Patterns’. This article should be on the reading list of anyone who’s new to JavaScript or not familiar with how objects and prototypes work. It takes you step by step through the basics all the way to protoypes and classes. The article is at: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/687093/Understanding-JavaScript-Object-Creation-Patterns I’d strongly recommend it!

I was recently at Devoxx in Antwerp, primarily because I wanted to get involved in some of the sessions that were being hosted by guys from the AngularJS team at Google. I’ve had a chance to work a little with Backbone and KnockoutJS and had been recently deliberately holding off looking at AngularJS so I could hit the conference and workshops fresh and unencumbered with any preconceptions. The sessions were great, and since then I’ve been working on a couple of projects that use Angular.

I’m currently writing a series of articles on the CodeProject called ‘Learn JavaScript’ and am pleased to say that the latest article is available now! Learn JavaScript Part 2 - Space Invaders In this article we take a look at how to create the classic space invaders game with plain JavaScript and HTML - no libraries or frameworks. You can see it in action on the page experiments/spaceinvaders. Check it out - as always, comments are welcome!

I have just released SharpShell 2.0 - you can get the release from sharpshell.codeplex.com or the new GitHub page at github.com/dwmkerr/sharpshell. This release has been primarily a bugfixing release, but there is one very useful new feature, the Server Registration Manager tool (srm.exe). This is a standalone application that can be used to install and uninstall SharpShell servers. srm install server.dll -codebase srm uninstall server.dll This tool makes it much easier to deploy SharpShell servers.

Sometimes I write up an article and some code on the CodeProject and get a good response, other times it seems an article sinks beneath the waves without any notice. Looking over some emails the other day, I noticed that my ConsoleControl article had actually received a slow and steady response of extremely positive feedback - people are using it and suggesting improvements. This is great, it’s one of the things I love about the community of developers that I’m part of.