If you've been following me on Twitter over the past couple of weeks, you might have noticed that I've been a little frustrated with the YouTube GData API lately. Simply put: XML makes me sad. Since that frustrated Tweet I've developed a solution using LINQ-to-XML and a bunch...
Frustration Central: Parsing the DateTime Values from the SlideShare REST API
I feel a little bad about posting this given that Jon Boutelle, the CTO of SlideShare, already admitted that this portion of the SlideShare 2.0 REST API sucks and that they're going to fix it eventually, but given that I'm in the middle of rewriting my original SlideShare...
Read More
The State of Open Web APIs
I wanted to repost a presentation that I saw on Twitter yesterday which highlights some interesting trends in the state of open web APIs across the board:
Making Basic Requests Against the SlideShare API Using HammockREST
The project I'm currently working on involves numerous REST APIs from a multitude of very different services. In my initial prototype, which I've since scrapped, I went with trying to use a local wrapper for each REST API incorporated into my project, meaning I used the GData library for...
Read More
How to Use the Microsoft Enterprise Library Validation Application Block, Part 1
All user input is evil, and you know it. Since the inception of .NET, ASP.NET developers have had access to the ASP.NET Validators Control Library, which made the previously tedious process of validating form input simple and in many instances, trivial. Microsoft's Enterprise Library makes this familiar ASP.NET functionality...
Read More
How to Test Regular Expressions in .NET without Giving Yourself Migraines
I write a lot of parse-heavy applications, so naturally I spend a fair amount of my development time writing and testing regular expressions. Regular expressions are one of those programming constructs where you always have a clear idea of what you need to do but you work with them just infrequently enough that you can...
Read More
BlogEngine.NET Extension - Remind Your Readers to Subscribe to Your RSS Feed with SubscribeRemind
One of my favorite WordPress plugins dating all the way back to when I first started blogging is Subscribe-Remind (WordPress) - it simply appends a small RSS subscription reminder to the footer of every blog entry for your readers! The reminder reads something like this:
If you enjoyed this post, make...
Read More
Popular .NET Libraries
I added a page a list of the .NET client libraries I use in my production and development code. Some of these, like NUnit and NLog, are pretty well-known to grizzled .NET developers, but others like the HTML Agility Pack and Hammock are not nearly as well-known as they should...
Read More
A New Year, a New Attitude
Hi,
After a couple of happy years blogging my forays into social media, Facebook application development, online marketing, and so forth on AjaxNinja / Marketing Ninja, I took a year-long break from blogging between May, 2009 and May, 2010. Now that I'm back in the saddle with my copy of Visual Studio,...