Microsoft to release MVC framework with Visual Studio 2008

As someone hinted in the comments to my previous posts on ASP.NET MVC frameworks, Microsoft is apparently releasing a new MVC framework to make ASP.NET development simpler. According to the latest news, it will be released sometime after Visual Studio 2008. Last time I heard VS2008 is scheduled for a late february 2008 release which means we should be lucky to see this framework sometime in March.

October 11, 2007 · Peter Krantz

RDF for beginners: Part 1: The URI

This will be the first in a series of posts on RDF for beginners. I hope it will be of use for people who are new to RDF but have some background in software development. One of the reasons I am putting this online is to get feedback on how RDF and the semantic web can be explained without sounding like an overenthusiastic preacher. Another reason is that most of the information I find about RDF is written by bearded researcher men....

October 3, 2007 · Peter Krantz

When PHP makes sense

I have been looking into development frameworks for a web based software product. I want the product to be able to be installed on a variety of platforms, including Windows server with IIS. First I was looking at creating the app in ASP.NET and make it run under Mono. Unfortunately I can’t find an MVC framework for ASP.NET that works the way I want. Ruby on Rails has really lowered the threshold of what I can put up with in the form of configuration and learning curve....

September 8, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Re-enacting Video Transition Effects

Please note the video progress bar. Via Jim Carlberg’s Finstilt.se.

August 31, 2007 · Peter Krantz

How the Swedish OOXML Vote Was Bought for $57,000

Sweden is represented in the ISO through the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS). This means that our country has one of the 100 or so votes. The member countries have had six months to consider if the Office Open XML (OOXML) format should become an ISO standard. In Sweden, SIS arranged a working group that have looked through the material. As you may know the OOXML format has been heavily criticized (by many e....

August 28, 2007 · Peter Krantz

SimpleCrawler for your everyday web crawling needs

Over at the standards-schmandards blog I often test websites to gather statistics on specific HTML use, accessibility and other things. Each time I have written a web crawler to collect the data. In Python and Ruby this is a simple task but last time it was like a déjà vu and I decided to create a Ruby library that I could use in the future. SimpleCrawler is a Ruby gem that covers basic web crawling needs....

August 27, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Content-aware Image Resizing

I am guessing this would be a valuable addition to web browsers in the future. With this technique it is easy to target an image for viewing in multiple displays (e.g. a 4:3 screen or a 16:9 TV). “Seam carving” allows an image to be resized non-uniformly, so you can change the height to width ratio in the image without cropping, but also without distorting important features in the image (such as faces)....

August 22, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Looking for ASP.NET MVC Frameworks...

I have been looking for an open source alternative to the default way of buildig web sites in ASP.NET with Visual Studio. After having build a couple of applications with Ruby on Rails it hard to go back to the Page Controller pattern that Microsoft introduced in ASP.NET. Coming back to the ASP.NET page event model makes it clear that they created it for VB6 application developers that were used to Windows forms-centered development....

August 18, 2007 · Peter Krantz

MySpace Layouts and Markup Quality

I have received an increasing number of advertising inquiries from MySpace layout sites. Apparently the term “MySpace layouts” is a very popular search term these days. Looking at the default MySpace layouts one can unserstand why. I am confident that they didn’t hire a designer to create the default MySpace look and feel. Looking at the MySpace HTML, they certainly didn’t hire a GUI developer. The markup looks like it was ripped from a teenage fan site from the early nineties:...

August 16, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Hackety Hack - The Foundation for a Revolution

Why the lucky stiff is a well known name among most Ruby developers. Many have read his Ruby programming tutorials and seen his spectacular performances (or whatever they are) at RailsConf and elsewhere. Personally, I owe him a lot for Hpricot, the liberal HTML parser (at my previous government agency Verva we used it to run the quarterly test of all public websites in Sweden). Hpricot is also the default parser for the Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit....

July 9, 2007 · Peter Krantz