Jay Hollingum - Works in IT

Having recently posted about new operating systems for mobile phones and the multitude of platforms that developers would have to develop for it, seems that a whole group of organisations, from network operators to handset makers, are clubbing together to create a common standard that developers can work with. It could be a while before any real progress is made and this tree begins to bear fruit, bearing in mind the hundreds of platforms, software, and hardware that exists already. The original article is from the Guardian and can be found here , where I first read about this being announced at the Mobile World Congress. The press release can be found on Marketwatch . This new consortium's website is at  http://www.wholesaleappcommunity.com .

When Google's web browser, Chrome , first came out, as quick and simple as it was, it seemed to lack a few of the extensions and features that were useful in Mozilla FireFox , especially for developers. Recently though, after having trouble with massive memory leaks in FireFox ( http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak ), Chrome got another try out ( Internet Explorer still seems to take forever to load up and feels like its dominating the browsing experience). No surprises in Chrome's simplicity, speed and efficiency, and the way it neatly lets you get on with browsing the web. It also come with nifty little developer tools, showing download speeds, CSS/HTML structure, access to scripts, all of which can be found from the page button link as shown in the video below, using the Page button > Developer > Developer tools link (or key combination CTRL + SHIFT + I). As always it boils down to personal preference and it's good that there is this choice (nevermind the be...

Reading through some reviews and articles of the Mobile World Congress 2010  and seeing Samsung's new Wave phone using their new platform Bada , reminded me of this post about MeeGo , that I made a while ago. The fact is that it is yet another system to develop on and then support, or if the angle of the phone companies is to have a selling point for their phones, whether the average consumer on the street even cares about what operating system their phone uses, unless buying in to a brand like Apple, Google or Microsoft. Developer documentation for Bada can be found at this site - http://developer.bada.com/apis/index.do .

Finally dragged myself in to the Twitter  era with a Twitter account. I'm still unsure as to its usefulness, objectives and what can be achieved with it, and I certainly won't be posting things like "filling kettle with water", "waiting for water to boil", "OMG! Still waiting for kettle to boil water", "Made cup of tea", so on and so forth. At the moment I'll probably just "tweet" new blog entries through it, which i'll mention in my next post and which seems like a pretty good first use as Twitter appears to ultimately be a tiny rapid fire blogging engine. This isn't to say it's totally useless or meaningless and i'm sure after reading  http://business.twitter.com/twitter101 , ideas on how to best use and take advantage of the site will become clear. Anyways, "follow me" on Twitter at  http://twitter.com/jayhollingum .

Sometimes javaScript files need to be sourced in the head of an HTML document; however the >net framework does not appear to update tIf you add a link element into the head of the .Net master page, e.g to use a style sheet, then the .Net framework takes care of sorting out the relative URI resource, so that the correct path for the style sheet is always used. e.g. linking to a style sheet in the head of a master page <link href="StyleSheetFile.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> would be automatically converted, if you went in to a sub directory, to <link href="../StyleSheetFile.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> However a source used to load a JavaScript file does not behave in the same way and the path remains as defined in the master page. e.g. linking to a javascript file in the head of a master page, no matter how deep in to the directory structure you go, will stay as <script sr...

It looks like yet another operating system is going to be developed for smartphones and mobiles and released to the world. Doing the rounds on the news sites and blogs is that story that Nokia and Intel have joined forces to work on a new OS. The spin is that this Linux based OS will not just be aimed at one hardware platform but can be scaled to be used on smartphones , TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems, or netbooks and anything in between. MeeGo is a merging of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo projects. With the successful uptake of Android in the mobile world and the related Chrome OS to be released, Windows 7 Mobile doing something to restore Microsoft's credibility, Palm entering the fray with their WebOS, the iPhone OS being so successful with the iPhone, and Symbian to mention but a few, how much more room in the market is there for OSs or is this two global corporations trying to emulate Google's success in their release of Android. Unless, of course...

A bit about Atom Displaying Atom feeds in a .NET page is pretty straight forward with just an XML control, and an XSL stylesheet for transforming the XML. As well as for Atom feeds, the info below can also be used for merging an RSS feed into a webpage. Atom is an XML-based format used by many blogs and the like, allowing for the syndication of information across the web. More info can be found about Atom at: Internet Engineering Task Force - The Atom Syndication Format Wikipedia entry about Atom Another bit but about XSL Technically XSL is family of technologies that allow for the tranformation and presentation of XML. XSLT is the language used for transformations, and is a subset of XSL, but for most purposes people use XSL and XSLT interchangably. Have a look at  W3C - The Extensible Stylesheet Language Family (XSL)  for more info. And Finally - Getting an Atom feed in to a page To get started with displaying an Atom feed in a .NET page, first off just add an X...

Needing to use unit testing with MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, I was a little stumped at first as VWD Express doesn't have the Create Unit Test Project dialog box when creating new projects. Selecting NUnit to use for unit testing wasn't too tough a choice (Visual Studio ships with Visual Studio Team Test but not with VWD 2008 Express). It's free, proven with a track record, and is widely used. First off NUnit needed to be downloaded and installed. Without stating the obvious NUnit can be downloaded from the website . After installing NUnit, I grabbed the NUnit Test Templates from  Updated NUnit Templates for ASP.Net MVC 1.0 RTM , on the  Visual Web Developer Team Blog , and followed the pretty straight forward instructions - unzipped the file and ran  installNUnit.cmd . Everything ran as sweet as after that, with the  Create Unit Test Project  dialog box popping up after starting up VWD 2008 Express and allowing unit testing of projects...

Looking forward to the release of the  Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 , it seems there's still a little bit of mystery as to it's release date. If SE leave it much longer then newer better Android phones are going to be out, which is a bit of a shame as it looks like the X10 could revive Sony's fortunes somewhat in the smart phone arena. It was good to see Sony going a little open source by using the Android OS, opening it up to the Android Market  and also ditching their own memory sticks in favor of the MicroSD format. The only disappointing thing is that it looks likely to be released with Android 1.6 and not 2.0 or 2.1. Hopefully it can be updated to the newer version of the OS. Release dates for the phone vary from 19th February on play.com  19th Feb on play.com, to  22nd April on expansys.com . Latest news reports rumour 1st March as written on mobiletoday.co.uk . Sony say only that it will be launched in Q1 of 2010. Either way, if SE hang aro...

I'm kind of confused about  Apple's iPad  and not really sure where it's going to fit in, in gadget world. Too big to be carried in the pocket and whipped out to browse the internet whilst stuck on the train, yet not feature rich enough to have anything meaningful that many smart phones or netbooks don't already have or can do, except the pretty nice bookcase and page turning stuff. To quote Jimmy Carr "It's like somebody inventing the wheel, then a year later saying 'Look! I've invented an even bigger wheel'." Although that chair Steve Jobs sat in whilst announcing it looked quite cool. Anyways, making the rounds on the internet now is a youtube video of a mock up that has been created of a Chrome OS UI on a tablet from Google. Admittedly it's only a concept from a Chrome designer posted on a third party site probably done in his spare time, but worth keeping an eye on and probably indicating that Apple won't have it all it's ow...