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If you take a look at theExperiments Page you’ll see that there’s a new entry - Space Invaders. Space Invaders is a great little game to code if you’re learning a new language or technology (and JavaScript is still very much in that category for me). I’ll be writing up how I made the game on the CodeProject soon enough (if you’re interested you can see how I made the starfield background in JavaScript).

I’m staring a series of articles on learning Javascript (the first is available at http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/642499/Learn-JavaScript-Part-1-Create-a-Starfield). To help with this, I’ve created the Experiments page. This page will host each of the things I’ve been playing with in the process of learning JavaScript and coming up with good topics for tutorials. You can see the Experiments page here, there’s also a link at the top of the site. If you like it, please feel free to comment on this post or get in touch.

In a Nutshell Sending a response in Express with a call like res.send(status, body) will send body as the status code if it is numeric - ignoring status. This is due to a fudge for backwards compatibility. The Details As part of a project I'm working on, I'm writing a service using node.jsand Express. This service exposes some entities in a MongoDB database through a REST API. Typically I hit this API through client-side Javascript, but in some places I want to hit the same API from some C# code - and I don't want to have to create classes for everything.

If you are using the following combination of tools: Visual Studio 2012 Visual Studio Tools for Git Nuget Then you may encounter some weird problems when trying to update Nuget packages. For me, updates regularly fail with: Recursive read lock acquisitions not allowed in this mode. I’m lost on the root cause of this, but it does seem that the project I’m working on has files set to read-only by something regularly, perhaps Visual Studio is trying to make Git more TFS-y by locking things all over the place.

I’m on holiday at the moment, back in sunny England. Holiday may not be the right term really, I’m mostly working through charity stuff (for my charity Namaste - Children’s Homes Nepal) and company administration. I’m also starting working on a big new project, which is pretty exciting. Anyway, I got a nice message from a fellow coder George Hahn who has put together a pretty cool project that lets you send files directly to Trello as an attachment to a card, or even as a new card.

I received the following message in my inbox the other day: ‘[Uservoice declined - Bring back the basic setup and deployment project type Visual Studio Installer.’ Some readers may recall my post on the frustrating removal of the simple deployment project from Visual Studio. Unfortunately, with this message, they have closed the Uservoice request to bring back the basic setup projects (the request is at http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3041773-bring-back-the-basic-setup-and-deployment-project-). It’s rare for me to blog or comment on products like visual studio, to complain or evangelise about features and so on, but in this case as the previous post had received some interest I thought I’d write an update.

Using Web Deploy is a nice and easy way to publish websites and web applications with Visual Studio. However, I found one thing that can be a bit of a blocker, that didn’t seem to be explained anywhere very well. Let’s imagine I administer a webserver that hosts the site www.something.com. I’ve installed the Remote Management tools for IIS and the Web Deploy stuff, and have also configured the site to allow Web Deploy.

Recently I’ve been working on a small project called Build Buttons. Build Buttons is a website that let’s you quickly create buttons for sharing and promoting content. You can use Build Buttons to create Facebook ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ buttons, LinkedIn ‘Share’ buttons, Google +1 buttons, GitHub Star, Fork and Follow buttons and more. Here’s how it works. First, go to www.buildbuttons.com: Now choose the kind of buttons you want, in this example we’ll select ‘Social Media’ from the top menu:

If at all possible nowadays, I write all my Windows UI code in WPF, it’s just quicker and easier than WinForms. Recently however, I came across a situation that you should just avoid. If you’re developing addins for multiple versions of Visual Studio - don’t use WPF for the Tools > Options windows. It’s just noit going to place nice out of the box. This is because there’s a lot of property page Win32 stuff going on in the host window that makes it hard to route messages properly - keyboard entry won’t work correctly, tab order will be messed up and more, it’s just not worth the pain.

For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to tie up a project I’ve been working on for a while called Sil. With lots of other things on my plate at the moment I haven’t had much of a chance to work on it, but finally tonight I’m able to release the first version. Sil is short for ‘See IL’, or ‘See Intermediate Language’. It’s primarily an addin for Visual Studio (2010 and 2012) that lets you right click on some code and disassemble it.