Awkward Coder

A previous post detailed how FINDaPAD was selected for the Nokia WP7 April ad campaign in the UK - more info can be found  here . For us the ad campaign has been very successful, we've doubled our total number of downloads in a month, okay we didn't have many in the first place but doubling the number of ' units sold ' in a month always sound good! The ad campaign ran for 4 weeks and started on or around the 1st of April. Before the campaign started we'd only had approximately 600 hundred downloads with the previous month showing 87 downloads: As I said the campaign had the affect of doubling our total number of downloads to approximately 1400: Interestingly the above graph has two peaks, the second is explained away as a patch release we did (2.1) -  a few bug fixes. The interesting factor about the second peak is there are about 200 users who had downloaded the update from the marketplace in the subsequent week. Does this figure represen...

If you've got apps in the WP7 UK marketplace you have the chance to be included in the Nokia and Microsoft ad campaign, more info can be found here . We ( Rich , Nick & I) had FINDaPAD put forward - thanks Matt . The ad campaign started a couple of days ago and we're being featured with an in-app banner and entry on the app highlights in the marketplace: We're already seeing great results, our daily download rates for the app have tripled in the first 2 days of the campaign :)

Just been building a new Win8 image and I thought I would use Chocolatey to install the apps I typically use for development, you know things like Notepad++, 7Zip, Sysinternals, PuTTY, msysgit... I got to say Chocolatey is awesome great! I can't believe the .Net  Windows community hadn't got round to this before... Once Chocolatey is installed it's really simple to get stuff installed, simple as typing one line in PS: Chocolatey will download the required package\installer and run what ever is required to get it installed, e.g. this is Chocolatey download loading and installing ILMerge:

I needed to fake some data for a WP7 app yesterday and I was about to write a couple of classes when I thought why not check out what's available out there already... There were already a couple of NuGet packages out there but I wanted to try out my forking skills on GitHub :) I had a quick conversation with Ben Smith about faker-cs   and producing a NuGet package.  Introducing Faker.Net on NuGet, with support for .Net 3.5 SP1, .Net 4.0, Silverlight & WP7. Faker.Net support loads of different ways to fake data - addresses, names, phones numbers and more: It's very simple to use, shown below is the code for the following WP7 apps: It could be used anywhere you need fake data - proof of concept, testing, demo apps...

I was reading ploeh's blog  this morning and it made me think about coupling and cohesion in general. These are import concepts in software development, Wikipedia has great definitions for both here & here . These are often contrasted together but they are different concepts and just because you have low coupling doesn't mean you'll have high cohesion. Using a car analogy the headlight unit for my Audi has tight (high) coupling because it's designed only to be fitted to a particular version. You could say it has high cohesion because it is part of a greater system to show light when a button is turned\clicked.... Taking another part of the car the tyre, the actual type of tyre will have low coupling to my Audi because it would suitable for several different models and makes, it would also have low coupling to the wheel, it has to fit a particular size but it could fit many wheels of this size. The tyre would still have high coh...

Following on from my previous post about testing javascript with jasmine. I was interested to explore integration into visual studio 2010 so I could run them along side test written in another language like C#. I found the VS 2010 extension Chutpah (pronounced  'hutz-pah'). This got me up and running with the ability to run test manually and to my surprised it worked by only have the SpecRunner.html file open. I didn't a csproj or sln file containing the javascript, it's clever enough to resolve all dependencies: Test results are render in the output window of VS 2010: This is good and I appreciate the work someone has done to get this far but I want more... I want integration into Resharper... A quick squizz on the inter'webs and I end posting a request on jetBrains forum , it looks like support is coming in R# 7. Then I thought lets check out the current beta and see, so off I go and boot Win8 and install R#7 beta and see if it's there yet... ...

I believe like a lot of devs that javascript is going to become more prevalent in a lot if not all areas of application development, whether that be with a server side framework like  node.js or client side with frameworks like backbone.js & knockout.js . I've built a couple of sites with backbone and I'm very interested in what Derik Bailey is doing with marionette , but with all my investigations into backbone I haven't as yet put any of the javascript I've written under as serious testing strategy. A quick search for a BDD style testing framework lead me to jasmine , I've heard good things and I thought I'd give it ago. What to put under test with jasmine? Previously I implemented a simple undo-redo framework for .Net called  undoable.net , this was pushed out to GitHub and I thought I'd port this to javascript. The important issue here is not the ported-code but how easy I found it to get jasmine up and running. First off downloaded...