Josh Holmes

Creating a Simple Silverlight Countdown Blog badge

joshholmes — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:45:05 GMT

I’m going to be speaking at RIAPalooza in about two weeks, well more specifically at the time of this writing it’s 10 days, 12 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds. :)

I’m going to be tag teaming with Mike Labriola again talking about “10 questions about RIA you haven’t had the courage to ask”. We’ve got a short list of questions but are hoping to get some questions from the crowd as well. If you happen to have any questions, feel free to shoot them to me in the comments section on this post.

Anyways, we were discussing different ways to get the word out about RIAPalooza and someone mentioned that we didn’t have have a blog badge so I decided to create one in Silverlight. In this post, I explain how I built the blog badge and share the code. Full details on my blog at Creating a Simple Silverlight Countdown Blog badge

Josh Holmes - Antidotal info on JavaScript Library Ext JS

joshholmes — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:50:44 GMT

I’m in conversation with a group that’s using Ext JS for their RIA. As I haven’t used it, I thought I’d go ask at the international water fountain that is twitter about it.

Anyone using Ext JS? Thoughts compared to jQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous?about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck

Read the responses I got back from a number of industry leader and JavaScript experts at Antidotal info on JavaScript Library Ext JS

Kalamazoo X conference

joshholmes — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:51:53 GMT

On the heels of the announcement by Michael Eaton, I thought I should post about how excited I am about the upcoming Kalamazoo X Conference…

The Kalamazoo X conference, while being put on by the technical community, is a very different sort of conference. You’re not going to hear “technical” talks. All of talks pertain to technical folk but it’s a step back from the nuts and bolts that we usually deal with day in and day out and focusing on the topics that are really important.

There’s an amazing line up of speakers and content. I blogged about a lot of these speakers on my blog at Kalamazoo X conference.

Interesting Web Development Related Resources

joshholmes — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:21:36 GMT

Like so many thing that we do in our daily development, there’s a high probability that someone has already solved the problem if you know where to look. This is just a collection of resources that I’ve found useful over time. Honestly, I’m posting these here because I need them in one place so that I can find them easily…

Read about all of these resources on my blog at Interesting Web Development Related Resources

Measuring ROI – Moving from Cost Center To Strategic Partner

joshholmes — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:19:54 GMT

I ran across this article on ZDNet (Wanted: ROI for internal app development) that really worried me. My friends at PreEmptive Solutions ran a survey across a wide number of developers that included people from 21 different industry segments in 33 countries asking about how the company measure the ROI of an application that they are building. The terrifying part is that the survey found that 58% of companies don't bother measuring ROI on their internal applications and the majority of the ones that do measure don't do so in a consistent and proven way.

For the full article – see my blog post at Measuring ROI – Moving from Cost Center To Strategic Partner

Three Essential Expression Blend Add-ins

joshholmes — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:48:24 GMT

Expression Blend, believe or not, has an add-in model. It’s highly unsupported but it exists. The unsupported nature of it means that you have to do a little Red Green style patching to get them to run in the first place and if they cause instability, don’t call Microsoft support. However, there are a couple of really cool ones that are out there.

To read all about these add-ins and how to get them running in Blend regardless of where you launch it from – check out my post at Three Essential Expression Blend Add-ins

Polar Plunging for the Special Olympics

joshholmes — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 03:14:13 GMT

I’m going to be polar plunging to raise money for the Special Olympics Michigan this coming weekend in Belleville.

This is a charity that is special to me because of my youngest daughter, Maura, who has a lot of challenges of her own. One day, my hope is to see her compete in the Special Olympics.

To find out how you can help – check out my post at Polar Plunging for the Special Olympics

UI Design for Developers Series, by Total Training

joshholmes — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:47:11 GMT

I’m at an internal conference at Microsoft this week and one of the sessions that I attended was called Practical Design tips and tricks for Developers. It was a set of hands on labs that were created out of the Expression team. It was really slick and I learned a whole lot of new techniques and am feeling a whole lot more confident in my Expression Blend abilities. The really slick part is that you get to work through those same labs if you are interested because they have been posted on Arturo’s blog.

For more details check out my post at UI Design for Developers Series, by Total Training.

Adding Paging to the Simple Photo Gallery

joshholmes — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:50:16 GMT

Over my last handful of posts, Building a Simple Photo Gallery in ASP.NET MVC Framework, Returning Thumbnails With the MVC Framework and Adding Lighbox.js to the Simple Photo Gallery I've built a simple photo gallery on the ASP.NET MVC framework.

In this post, we're going to continue that project by adding paging rather than showing all of the pictures on the one page.

In this post, we leverage LINQ to select the data in the model that we want to show and implement paging.

Read the full post at Adding Paging to the Simple Photo Gallery

Adding Lighbox.js to the Simple Photo Gallery

joshholmes — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:49:54 GMT

In my previous two posts, Building a Simple Photo Gallery in ASP.NET MVC Framework and Returning Thumbnails With the MVC Framework, I built a simple photo gallery on the ASP.NET MVC framework. In this post we are going to start making this a little prettier. To start with, we are going to leverage an JavaScript project called Lightbox.js

To read more about this and the rest of the project, see my post at Adding Lighbox.js to the Simple Photo Gallery

Returning Thumbnails With the MVC Framework

joshholmes — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:49:02 GMT

In my last post, we put together a quick and simple photo gallery. This post will be building on that.

Depending on the size of your photo, however, it didn't have the worlds greatest user experience. I'll be playing with the CSS, JavaScript and a ton more over time. Today, however, I'm going to be just returning a thumbnail rather than the full picture to show in the view.

I don't want to have to physically create each of the thumbnails so we'll generate those dynamically on the fly.

Read the full post to find out how to dynamically generate thumbnails, create a custom ActionResult and leverage that all in an MVC view.

Full post on my blog at Returning Thumbnails With the MVC Framework

Building a Simple Photo Gallery in ASP.NET MVC Framework

joshholmes — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:32:01 GMT

I decided to create a simple photo gallery in the ASP.NET MVC framework. The fun part is that this level of application is really the new "Hello World". It takes less time to build than the "Hello World" did back in the day.

In this post, I'll walk you through the process of creating this simple photo gallery with the MVC framework.

You can see the full walk-through at Building a Simple Photo Gallery in ASP.NET MVC Framework

Playing with JSON

joshholmes — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:35:24 GMT

I was asked on Friday by a friend how one can consume JSON in Silverlight. At the time, I just said start with the System.Json namespace and I’ll get you a sample later. Well, here’s a sample and a peek into my head because I couldn’t just stop with creating the sample that he needed.

In the end, I did a couple of different Silverlight examples including leveraging the JsonObject and LINQ. Then I ended up doing samples in raw JavaScript, MSAjax, Prototype and JQuery. Finally I ended it all up by mixing JQuery and Silverlight. That was fun and remarkably simple.

Read all about it on my blog at Playing with JSON.

Too much to see at the MDC Detroit

joshholmes — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:19:37 GMT

I'm not normally overly excited about the large Microsoft events, however, I'm really looking forward to the MDC Detroit next week.

The idea behind the show is that it's taking the most critical sessions from PDC and repackaging them in a one day format.

I've had a chance to go through a lot of the content and see what all is going to be show. The cool part about it is that the vast majority of the talks are doing a demo. This is a big departure from a lot of the multi-city roadshows that Microsoft puts on and it's a good thing. You'll actually get to see code running. You'll see applications being built. The other thing is that these demos are real world. It's not hello world style demos. In my talk, I'm actually building a full line of business HR application that reads and writes from the database.

The full schedule and a really slick video about the DevCon on my blog at Too much to see at the MDC Detroit…

Chuck Norris writes code under the name Josh Holmes

joshholmes — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:51:22 GMT

I love Chuck Norris jokes. One of my favorites is "Some people wear Superman pajamas. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas." There are a ton of them out there. There are even entire web sites dedicated to Chuck Norris jokes such as http://www.thechucknorrisfacts.com/. Most of those jokes are hysterical though some are slightly less than politically correct.

So Bill Wagner accidentally started jokes about me. Bill was actually responding to me when I posted that it was -8 outside. The full context is that "-8 keeps out the riff raff" but as you can read below, it looks like he was saying that I'm the one that keeps out the riff raff.

Leon Gershing (aka fallenrogue) took that and ran with it ala Chuck Norris jokes. Since then a ton of people have started piling on. (btw - Leon actually named this post to)

billwagner: @joshholmes Keeps out the riff raff.
1 day ago · Reply · View Tweet

fallenrogue: @billwagner I hear @joshholmes' tears cure cancer.... too bad he's never cried.
1 day ago · Reply · View Tweet

They keep on going. I've got a whole lot more of these jokes on my blog at Chuck Norris writes code under the name Josh Holmes

*Update - a lot more jokes added on my blog - enjoy! *