Andy Butland

Pulled a little of what's left of my hair out with this little gotcha looking at an issue with Umbraco. I was looking to add a small feature to allow you to re-order a list.  Umbraco (version 7) uses angularjs in the back-office.  Updating this controller and view code was very straightforward to add a couple of buttons to move the list items up and down.  However although I could see the order was properly being saved to the database, the retrieved list remained in the order that the items were created. Using the Chrome console network tab I could see that the JSON response was coming back from the server in the correct order: ... key":"items","value":{"10":"aaa","7":"bbb","8":"ccc"} ... However as soon as this materialised in code, the order was lost: ... key":"items","value":{"7":"bbb","8":"ccc","10":"aaa...

Umbraco CMS have recently moved their source code from CodePlex to Github which has triggered a flurry of contributions in the form of pull requests. Previously I had made a few small contributions to the project whilst on Codeplex and have now submitted some to Github. Whilst GitHub is very easy to use and has excellent documentation I managed to get in a bit of a tangle trying to manage different issues, so mostly for my own future benefit, am noting two working processes here. If anyone else reads, first port of call should be the Umbraco contribution documentation and GiHub's own help pages on forking and pull requests . One issue is that like other source control hosts, only one pull request can be submitted per branch. In order to keep things simple for the person on the other end, it makes sense not to combine several issues into one pull request. Hence coding the first issue in master branch, pull requesting, and then trying to move onto a second in master branch...

Been spending a bit of time recently looking at JavaScript frameworks, and having a prototype project avaialble as an excuse to work on something, built a small application using Durandal . Have been concious recently that my front-end code wasn't nearly as structured and well organised as that I would write on the server side, and found this a great library for helping organise this code into modules. It also utilises knockout for UI binding via view models and views. Mostly the app runs as a SPA, though the prototype had an additional requirement to support offline access on devices. To support that I planned to package up the app using PhoneGap . That's the background... mainly though for this blog post wanted to record some links and notes for getting set up with this framework, and in particular the phonegap build service . Firstly I looked to use local PhoneGap. To get running found a couple of handy links: From PhoneGap themselves And from Clean Code Devel...

This is the last of a three part series of posts on BackgammonR – an online Backgammon game built with SignalR. If you haven’t read it already, please see Part 1 – Game Engine and Part 2 – Server Side SignalR The first bit of JavaScript to note is not actually something you write, rather what SignalR generates in order for it to allow for the messages to be passed between client and server and vice versa. It’s at /signalr/hubs/ and if you view it you’ll can see how the methods defined on the server-side hub are exposed to the client. The script I have written though lives in /public/site/backgammon.js and whilst it consists of a number of methods it can be considered in three main sections. Data Binding Before getting into the client-side SignalR code it’s worth flagging up the other libraries I’ve used here. Jquery of course. But also knockout , which provides a nice separation between the intricacies of the UI and the details of the client-side model manipulated in co...

This is the second of a three part series of posts on BackgammonR – an online Backgammon game built with SignalR. If you haven’t read it already, please see Part 1 – Game Engine . SignalR actually provides two abstractions above the base technologies for maintaining persistent connections between browser and server. One is fairly low-level, called PersistentConnection that I didn’t look into. The other is Hubs . I have a single SignalR hub called GameNotificationHub which inherits from Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Hub and thus obtains its base functionality. Within that class you can create public methods, which – once SignalR has worked its magic – become end-points that can be called from the client-side JavaScript. They all return void though – which initially seems counter-intuitive and not what you would do were you wiring up an end-point for an AJAX request for example. However the point is of course that with this type of application we may need to push responses to th...