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	SignalR - Right Now! Posted 5/14/2012 by Jeremiah Billmann, Software Engineer If you’re a web developer, then surely you’ve run into a situation similar to the following: If only I were able to easily notify active users of the web application, real time, from the web server. Chances are, if you attempted to move forward with solving this problem you constructed a JavaScript function set on an interval to make continuous requests to the server in search of said notifications. This ‘duct tape’ approach, while somewhat invisible to the user, is not fool-proof by any stretch of the imagination and has negative performance implications associated with it (amongst other things). Those days are gone. Full Article >

	Certifications: Are They Worth the Effort? Posted 5/11/2012 by Chris Plate, Software Engineer One of my clients recently asked me about my experience with Microsoft's certification exams, as the client was considering some sort of certification program for their staff. This led me to reflect on how much time I actually spent preparing for the exams, and moreover, whether the results were comparable with the effort I put into obtaining them. Full Article >

	Getting Started with Knockout and ASP.NET MVC Posted 4/20/2012 by Jeremiah Billmann, Software Engineer In case you haven’t heard, HTML5 and JavaScript are all the rage in the web world! As a result, and as one might expect, we are seeing web applications with very rich user interfaces. These rich user interfaces often have complex JavaScript code to make these things possible. Fear not, a JavaScript library called Knockout is available to simplify these scenarios by applying the MVVM (Model-View-View Model) pattern and with that, gain declarative bindings, automatic UI updates and dependency tracking. Full Article >

	Getting Started with Azure for Developers Posted 3/29/2012 by Kenny Young, Director, Cloud Coumputing & Development If you’re looking to get started with Azure, here’s a quick overview of where you should begin. I’m assuming that you already have Visual Studio 2010 or the Visual Studio 11 Beta (which you can download for free, including Ultimate version!). The first thing you are going to need is an account. Head to the Microsoft Azure site and sign up for your 90-day free trial of Azure. Full Article >

	Grid Layout, Modal Dialogs and Drop Shadows with jQuery and CSS3 Posted 3/28/2012 by Ian FitzGerald, Software Engineer A modern trend in web design is to use modal dialogs to present more information rather than opening a popup or navigating to a different page. You can often find this design on photo galleries, where clicking one of the photos will cause a window to open within the page while the rest of the page fades to darkness. Implementing this feature is surprisingly simple. This article will show you how. Full Article >

	HTML 5 Markup Posted 3/22/2012 by John Ptacek, Senior Software Engineer Here’s another post in my series about the technology for the Riverview Gardens Give Camp Skyline held recently. One of the great things about the Give Camp was the learning opportunities for our associates. The emerging HTML 5 standard has many new and interesting pieces that make it a great tool for developing web based applications. Let's take a look at some of the new tags. Full Article >

	HTML 5 for Applications Posted 3/21/2012 by John Ptacek, Senior Software Engineer With the Skyline Give Camp just behind us, I thought I would kick off a wave of blog posts about some of the technology we will be used during the Give Camp. First up, let’s discuss HTML. There has been a lot (and I mean a lot) of enthusiasm for HTML 5 for creating applications, but what does that really mean? In general, I believe there are two things people mean when they discuss HTML 5. The first is the HTML standard itself. The second is creating applications using HTML 5. We will touch on each of those. Full Article >

	An Overview of .NET Threading and Tasks Posted 2/16/2012 by Greg Levenhagen, Senior Software Engineer With the release of .NET 4, Microsoft added a new namespace under the System.Threading namespace called System.Threading.Tasks. All of the previous threading abilities are still available, but the new additions provide a different way to work with multi-threaded constructs. With the evolution of multi-threaded capabilities within the .NET framework, things can get a little confusing. Here is a brief history with some notes. Full Article >

	Make Your Website More Accessible to Mobile Devices with a Single Line of Mark-up Posted 2/13/2012 by Keith Burnell, Senior Software Engineer I have been working a lot with MVC sites lately and experimenting with how to make them "usable" on mobile browsers. This post is about the single line of mark-up you can add to your site's Master Page, or in this case your _Layout.cshtml. Full Article >

	Strategy for Unit Testing of Legacy Application Code Posted 2/10/12 by Steve Nelson, Senior Software Engineer The advent of unit testing frameworks within the past few years has given the development community valuable tools that can help to create high-quality systems. Systems built using rigorous unit testing during the development cycle tend to generate fewer defects found during integration testing. A unit testing framework allows a developer to create tests that can be executed against their code to ensure that it functions correctly. The unit testing framework that is included with VisualStudio is one such example. Full Article >

	Entity Framework Code First Enum Posted 1/16/2012 by Keith Burnell, Software Engineer The most requested feature for Entity Framework has been Enum support for a very long time. At TechEd this year it was announced that Enums would be supported in the next version of the Entity Framework and in June the Entity Framework June CTP was released with Enum support as well some other enhancements. Full Article >

	Creating Your Own jQuery Plugins Posted 1/5/2012 by Dan Lorenz, Software Engineer jQuery is a powerful JavaScript library that can help you write client-side code quickly and efficiently, while being cross-browser friendly. (It’s even somewhat fun to code in!) The jQuery team has created the framework in a way that allows developers to write their own plugins for other developers to use. This post will take you through the steps to create your own plugin. Full Article >