Reinstalled Windows 7. I now have another 30 days to buy a key. On the minus side, the browser choice came up, UNDER the IE8 install. #

Finding it very hard to motivate myself to blog about my work on application config sharing. It's a boring topic to be honest! #

@cookeharry in reply to cookeharry #

It seems that .NET 4 has implemented string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(). Bout time. Now they need the opposite, string.HasValue() #

Wrote a tiny PermanentRedirect which utilises #T4MVC Very nice. #

I very nearly messed something up, but the cached copy of a Google's search result saved me. #

@scottgu If they're in the vicinity of York/Yorkshire, then I'd love to come along! in reply to scottgu #

@Danatkinson Being intimidated by dangly awesomeness is surely the job for the ladies department?! in reply to Danatkinson #

@richardstelmach @SarahSuperbreak And we won the gold last time round. in reply to richardstelmach #

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@Cravendale lol! Thank you for that! Great stuff! Although our milk is bought for us! in reply to Cravendale #

@davymacca I would have guessed that the reason was because it had its own climbing wall. But since that's not an option… B?! in reply to davymacca #

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Interesting how, when sstatic.net stops responding, SO comes grinding to a halt. #

@dmcnally There are some tests that can't account for user stupidity. in reply to dmcnally #

I'm grateful I can switch my hearing aid off if I don't want to hear people talking loudly on the phone. #

I like JMeter much more than SoapUI. Mainly because Sophos doesn't have a problem with any of the DLLs in JMeter. #

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Slipped and fell on my arse at the final few steps on my way to work. Bloody gripless loafers. #

@oliverpicton Sounds like you're reading about NHibernate. in reply to oliverpicton #

I don't want a new TV, but I appear to have gotten one anyway… #

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@maartenballiauw No, that's just drinking less coffee! in reply to maartenballiauw #

It's easy to tell I've not been at work for a week when there's only been 17 commits on our development trunk! #

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Just got an email from Google telling me they're phasing out support for shitty old browsers (IE6/FF2 et al). That's awful nice of them! #

WordPress is a bit eager. Every time I update my blog article, it retweets it. This is not good since I'm a serial updater! #

@jonskeet You know, you should probably write a blog post on how your boss cooking your team breakfast increases productivity! in reply to jonskeet #

Should I feel a warm tingle when @scottgu and @elijahmanor retweet me, or is that just… weird?! #

@elijahmanor Thanks for the RT! in reply to elijahmanor #

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Weirdly spaced icons
What’s that all about? When I saw the home screen, I wondered if it was accidentally set to ‘visually impaired mode’. And then I realised that this was what Apple intended. You know, in case you’re wearing gloves or something. I guess this is because the apps are from the iPhone App store, and if they were any larger, they’d look all pixilated and horrible.

Multitasking
You can’t multitask on it (at least not until it’s inevitably jailbroken). Steve Jobs remarked that netbooks are just inferior laptops. I won’t give him a lot of argument there, but at least I can watch a movie and tweet about it to FilmReviewFriday at the same time on a netbook. I know the iPhone doesn’t have multitasking, and even that’s getting tiring, but on what should be a fully blown OS is just unacceptable. Instead they opted for an operating system that’s better suited for phones and games consoles. The iPhone OS is a pretty good OS, there’s no doubt about it. It’s pretty stable, but then, everything’s sandboxed, so there’s no reason to suggest it wouldn’t be. But it’s not fit for purpose on devices that are meant to function in the way that iPads are supposed to. The iPhone OS is very similar to Android OS, but I can’t imagine anyone rushing out to the shops to buy a computer than can only run Android.

iPhone app look awful
Who at Apple thought that the solution to this would be either blowing everything up to epic proportions would be the way to go? Even worse, lets have it the same size as it is on the iPhone. So you end up with this giant area of black surrounding it. Which brings me onto my next point.

Massive bezel
The bezel would be the HUGE ass area surrounding the screen itself. Do I really need all that space? Do they expect that all their users have inflamed thumbs and therefore they need that so that they don’t inadvertantly press something while they rest the iPad awkwardly on their lap and type on that shitty keyboard.

It looks like a giant iPhone
I can’t imagine what Apple was thinking. What on Earth made them decide that scaling up the form factor was going to make it visually attractive to customers? On the plus side, now I can know how my boss feels when she holds her iPhone. Not that I’d want to.

Widescreen video
I think even Steve Jobs was ashamed of this feature when he showed a video of Star Trek in widescreen. The aspect ratio of the iPad is closer to 4:3 (ie, old-style televisions), than the 16:9 ratio that the iPhone offers.

No Camera
Why the hell not? You’ve got this machine that has WiFi and 3G (optional!) capabilities, and yet, if you want to video chat, or record something to upload to YouTube, you’re fucked. You need to use a regular computer for that. But don’t worry, at least you can work on your presentation in iWork, explaining to the board why your department spent a huge chunk of the budget on tampons for guys.

The criticism I don’t buy into:

I don’t believe that everything thrown at the iPad is valid. Some people clearly expect too much of it. It is, after all, only a giant iPhone.

No ability to do software/web development
Come on! Was that seriously the going through your mind when you saw the announcement? “Shit, I can’t create awesome websites and applications on it.” If you have a netbook, I would say that it’s pretty darn likely that you own at least one other machine. One that holds all your games, maybe some *ahem* porn, and your dev tools. If you don’t own more than one other machine, and you’re intending to do your development work on a netbook/tablet, then I suggest you getting something better than an iPad, but also an actual machine with some real oomph under the bonnet.

No flash
I’m conflicted about this because I see the argument of both sides. Flash is ubiquitous. If you watch video online, or play Farmville (like my wife) or whatever awesomeness is cooking over at Adult Swim. That said, the web is moving forward, and as part of that, online video outlets are starting to use HTML 5 to offer its content. YouTube recently announced that it too would be supporting this, and you now have an option to view their videos this way. As Joe Hewitt has said:

The thing that bugs me about Flash is it only exists because of IE’s shittiness. If Firefox/WebKit were at 100%, nobody would author Flash.

And he’s right. There’s not a lot keeping Flash on people’s machines, apart from Internet Explorer, that is. But what about those games? Well, there’s still room for Flash, just not the plugin. Enter Gordon! Gordon is “An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript with SVG”. And it works on the iPhone too! It’s still in the early stages of implementation (it’s literally only two weeks old!), but it has a great future ahead of it, and definitely serves to free us from that restraint.

Summary
So, at the end of the day, I don’t like the iPad. Sure, it’s only v1, and Apple tend to churn out product refreshes about every 12-18 months, but if this is only the starting point, I don’t hold out much hope for it’s future.

I guess it just goes to show that not everything Jonathan Ive shits is worth its weight in gold.

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The kudos for this goes to ‘Daniel T‘ who wrote the original JSON implementation.

I was helping out on StackOverflow, and I came across a question which asked why a users custom route constraint didn’t work. Their implementation was for JSON only, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be extended further to encompass any ContentType.

And that’s what I’ve done…

First let’s the ConstraintContentType enum and add a few example MIME types into the description attributes:

  public enum ConstraintContentType
  {
    [Description("text/xml")]
    XML,
    [Description("application/json")]
    JSON,
    [Description("text/html")]
    HTML
  }

Now, let’s create something so that we can get the description attribute:

  public static class Enum
  {
    public static string Description(T value)
    {
      DescriptionAttribute[] da = (DescriptionAttribute[])(typeof(T).GetField(value.ToString()).GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false));
      return da.Length > 0 ? da[0].Description : value.ToString();
    }
  }

And now the ContentTypeConstraint:

namespace MyWebsite
{
  public class ContentTypeConstraint : IRouteConstraint
  {
    private ConstraintContentType contentType;

    public ContentTypeConstraint(ConstraintContentType constraintType)
    {
      contentType = constraintType;
    }

    public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
    {
      if (routeDirection == RouteDirection.UrlGeneration)
        return true;

        return httpContext.Request.ContentType == Enum.Description(contentType);
    }
  }
}

So how do you use it?

Well…

  routes.MapRoute(
    "JsonOnlyRoute",
    "json/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" },
    new { contentType = new ContentTypeConstraint(ConstraintContentType.JSON) }
  );

It’s that simple! Now the only content type that matches this route is JSON. Of course, you could easily expand this to include a whitelist/blacklist approach, and also add in more MIME types, but that’s just another reason why the ASP.NET MVC routing system is so great – it’s so extensible!

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