Scott Hanselman

I have a "whenever I get around to doing it" Newsletter of Wonderful Things. Why a newsletter? I dunno. It seems more personal somehow. Fight me.

Still, it's one more site to check and it's a hassle for some of you  Dear Readers. Therefore, I will still do the newsletter, but I'll post each newsletter to the blog some weeks later.

You can view all the previous newsletters here. You can sign up here Newsletter of Wonderful Things or just wait and get them later on the blog, which hopefully you have subscribed to.

Hi Interfriends,

Thanks again for signing up for this experiment. Here's some interesting things I've come upon this week. If you forwarded this (or if it was forwarded to you) a reminder, you signed up at http://hanselman.com/newsletter and the archive of all previous Newsletters is here.

• Great introduction to D3.js - a ridiculously powerful javascript library for visualizations. D3 show reel.
• A PILE of LifeHacks. Really take a minute and check them out. MIND BLOWN.
• From John Carmack: "'Sometimes, the elegant implementation is a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function."
• This is what happens if you give a cake shop a USB stick containing an image you want to appear on a cake:http://i.imgur.com/xTQEp9Z.jpg via @harrisimo
• A great pep talk from Kid President.
• A good list of the most popular fonts of 2012, by http://www.myfonts.com/newsletters/sp/201301.html
• Plex is the media center software ecosystem I've been waiting for
• "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes. - WG"
• So, this happened. http://heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa.com
• Guy recreates entire Toy Story using real toys and live action.
• Learn How to Use Windows 95 with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry
• Doom 3: Gangnam Style using WebGL, all in your modern browser. Insane.
• 300 Million Year Old Machine found in Russia...aliens?
• Attractive JavaScript plotting for jQuery
• Learn Advanced HTML & CSS with one useful guide
• Wonder how those Computer UIs in movies like Tron get created?
• Taking project management too far? Scrum for Kids.
• The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord
• Meet “Dashan,” the Canadian Comedian Who Achieved Accidental Stardom in China

Scott Hanselman

(BTW, since you *love* email you can subscribe to my blog via email here: http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman DO IT!)

P.P.S. You know you can forward this to your friends, right?

Sponsor: Big thanks to this week's sponsor. I've checked this book out myself and it's VERY useful. Free eBook – 50 ASP. NET & SQL Server performance tips from the dev community, to help you avoid, find, and fix performance issues in your ASP.NET app. Download it from http://www.red-gate.com/50ways

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I love getting pull requests on GitHub. It's such a lovely gift when someone wants to contribute their code to my code. However, it seems there are three kinds of pull requests that I get.

1. Awesome, appreciated and wanted.
2. Not so good, thanks for trying, but perhaps another time.
3. THE WALL OF PINK

I'd like to talk about The Wall of Pink. This is a pull request that is possibly useful, possibly awesome, but I'll never know because 672 lines (GitHub tells me) changed because they used CRs and I used LFs or I used CRLF and they used LF, or I used...well, you get the idea.

There is definitely a problem here. But what's the problem? Well, it's kind of like endianness, except we're still talking about it in 2013.

"A big-endian machine stores the most significant byte first—at the lowest byte address—while a little-endian machine stores the least significant byte first." - Endianness

Did you know for a long time Apple computers were big endian and Intel computers were little endian? The Java VM is big endian. I wrote shareware code generator 16 years ago that generated a byte array on an Intel PC that was later entered into a PalmPilot running a Motorola 68328. This was the last time I thought about endianness in my career. Folks working on lower-level stuff do think about this sometimes, admittedly, but the majority of folks don't sweat endianness day to day..

TCP/IP itself is, in fact, big endian. There was a time when we had to really think about the measurable performance hit involved in using TCP/IP on a little-endian processor. But we don't think about that anymore. It's there but the abstraction is not very leaky.

It's years later, but CR/LF issues plague us weekly. That Wall of Pink I mentioned? It looks like this. I had to scroll 672 lines before I saw the +green where the added lines were added. Who knows what really changed here though? Can't tell since this diff tool thinks every line changed.

Sigh.

Whose fault is this?

Perhaps we blame Émile Baudot in 1870 and Donald Murray in 1899 for adding control characters to instruct a typewriter carriage to return to the home position plus a line feed to advance the paper on the roller. Or we blame Teletype machines. Or the folks at DEC, or perhraps Gary Kidall and CP/M for using DEC as a convention. Then the bastards at IBM who moved to ASCII from EBCDIC and needed a carriage return when punch-cards fell out of favor.

The text files we have to day on Windows still have a CR LF (0D 0A) after every line. But Apple uses just uses a line feed (LF) character. There's no carriage to return, but there are lines to advance so it's a logical savings.

Macs and PCs are sharing text more than ever. We live in a world where Git is FTP for code, we're up a level, above TCP/IP where Endianness is hidden, but still in text where CR LF's aren't.

We store our text files in different formats on disk, but later when the files are committed to Git, how are they stored? It depends on your settings and the defaults are never what's recommended.

You can setup a .gitattributes per repo to do things like this:

*.txt -crlf

Or you can do what GitHub for Windows suggests with text=auto.

# Auto detect text files and perform LF normalization
* text=auto

What's text=auto do?

This ensures that all files that git considers to be text will have normalized (LF) line endings in the repository. The core.eol configuration variable controls which line endings git will use for normalized files in your working directory; the default is to use the native line ending for your platform, or CRLF if core.autocrlf is set.

It uses the native line ending for your platform. But if you spend a few minutes googling around you'll find arguments several ways with no 100% clear answer, although most folks seem to believe GitHub has the right one.

If this is the right answer, why isn't it a default? Is it time to make this the default?

This is such a problem that did you know GitHub for Windows has dedicated "normalize your repo's CRLF" code? They'll fix them all and make a one-time commit to fix the line endings.

I think a more complete solution would also include improvements to the online diff tool. If the GitHub repro and server knows something is wrong, that's a great chance for the server to suggest a fix, proactively.

Solutions

Here's some possible solutions as I see it.

• Make Windows switch all text files and decades of convention to use just LF
• Git needs to install with correct platform-specific defaults without needing .gitattributes file
• Have the GitHub web application be more proactive in suggesting solutions and preventing badness
• Have the GitHub for Windows desktop application proactively notice issues (before I go to settings) and offer to help
• Make the diff tool CR/LF aware and "do the right thing" like desktop diff tools that can ignore line ending issues

Until something is done, I'll always tense up when I see an incoming pull request and hope it's not a Wall of Pink.

Thoughts?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Last year the ASP.NET team started talking about something we're calling "One ASP.NET." I showed some mockups of our ideas last summer at the aspConf Keynote that you can watch online.

We also announced then that we would add new features to ASP.NET as out of band releases (OOB) without breaking existing functionality. This means that developers don't have to wait for the next version of Visual Studio for great web development features today. We're aiming to add to ASP.NET and Web Tools every 6 months.

For those that don't want to wait, Mads and the team also started a feature playground called Web Essentials. This is an extension to Visual Studio that updates all the time with ideas and brainstorms about how VS can be an even better editor for the web. As features "graduate" from Web Essentials, they move into ASP.NET and Web Tools proper. A bunch of features graduate with today's release.

Today we announced ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2. You can use the Web Platform Installer to get ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 now.

Get it with the Online Installer:

Get ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 with Web Platform Installer

OR use the Offline Installers:

1. Get the ASP.NET 2012.2 pieces then get one of these

2. Web Tools 2012.2 for any regular Visual Studio 2012 or  Web Tools 2012.2 for Visual Studio Web Express 

Here's some highlights:

Editors

Syntax Highlighting for client side templating languages within the HTML editor like:

• CoffeeScript
• Mustache
• Handlebars
• JsRender

Other editors get new features as well:

• Syntax Highlighting, intellisense and validation for LESS files.
• Intellisense for Knockout.js bindings!
• CSS Auto Sync - type into the CSS editor while the site running and get live updates in Page Inspector
• Everyone's favorite "Paste JSON as Class." Copy some JSON into the clipboard, paste and get either C# or VB classes for your JSON to serialize into.

Browsers

Mobile Emulator support adds extensibility hooks so that third-party emulators and unusual browsers can be installed as a VSIX. The installed emulators will show up in the F5 dropdown, so that developers can preview their websites on a variety of devices. Read more about this feature in my entry on the new BrowserStack integration with Visual Studio.

Packages

With today’s release, all of the ASP.NET templates have updated versions of jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Validation, Modernizr, Knockout, and other open source NuGet packages. Your existing projects won't update unless you update them explicitly.

ASP.NET

• OData support in ASP.NET Web API
• SignalR included out of the box and fully supported
• Web Forms now supports Friendly URLs (no more .aspx extension)
• Web Forms supports device (mobile) specific pages, so product.aspx can also have product.mobile.aspx.
• Updated Single Page Application template
• MVC Facebook Application Template
• Web Sites get the same publishing tools as Web Projects

These are just the highlights. But let me call out one specific feature that gets us closer to one of the main goals for One ASP.NET which is what I call a more level playing field.

Community Project Templates

One of the most significant "under the hood" changes is the ability to add a project template via a VSIX.

We'll be seeing an update to the Visual Studio Gallery soon that will make it so you can upload your own VSIX files (Visual Studio Extensions) that can be installed (and easily updated) into the ASP.NET MVC File New Project dialog with one click.

It's important to know that we're only halfway there. This is likely not what the final unified One ASP.NET dialog will end up looking like, but it's a start as it's a good place to open up for new templates.

Phrased differently, project templates should be as easy to share as NuGet packages. That's a goal.

Another goal is to be able to take an example project that looks the way you want, with the NuGet packages setup as you like them, then "Save As | Project Template" then publish the resulting template/VSIX to the gallery. That means projects like NancyFX, or FubuMvc or whatever you can think of can live next to out of the box templates.

Here's the initial documentation on how you can create VSIXs of project templates, get in this dialog and make it easy to spread your vision of a great web app. We are working to make this process fewer steps and unify things, but this works great now with VS2012.2 so you can get started today. Stay tuned for more on this.

In the near future we'd like to see the community sharing project templates that look the way the community wants them to look, living side by side with templates from Microsoft.

As start, we're announcing four Single Page Application (SPA) templates you can install now. Please note that these community templates could be anything, the VSIX hooks are wide open, it's just that the first few happen to be SPA templates.

• Ember - a template using Emberjs and Handlebars.
• Durandal - a template with Durandal at its heart, bringing in require.js, knockout.js and more.
• Breeze - a template using Breeze.js.

And, a clever play on words from John Papa (because what do you get in a SPA?)

• HotTowel - a more complex template that includes knockout, bootstrap, sammy, toastr, q, momentjs, breeze and puts them all together into one SPA example.

Note how nice the HTML editor looks when working on an Ember project, for example. We've got syntax highlighting, HTML5 Intellisense and coloring in our Mustache templates.

Remember, you'll need the 2012.2 release to see these new templates, so use Web Platform Installer to get ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 now. And, if you want check out our future playground features like Zen Coding, CoffeeScript and lots more, also pick up Web Essentials. Note that Web Essentials is a small extension and if it causes you any trouble you can just disable it.

Should you fear this release?

ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 doesn't change any GAC'ed (Global Assembly Cache) files. It won't mess up your install of ASP.NET or change any existing projects. It's changes are either tooling within Visual Studio, or additions and improvements via local NuGet packages.

Go get it. ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I love how social media shatters the barriers to entry for fans. I can tweet my favorite actors and authors, like my favorite comic artists or writers and connect with them in a way that has not just immediacy but a social connectedness that's so satisfying.

But there's also something to be said for a letter in the mail. Being a fan can be reading and enjoying but it can also be appreciating and reaching out. I'm trying to teach a sense of appreciation to my sons and encouraging them to reach out.

They love these books in the Joey Fly Private Eye series. They are super cute and great fun for the kids.

After reading them (many times) my boys decided that they needed to write a fan letter to the writer, Aaron Reynolds, and the artist, Neil Numberman.

It was more than a fan letter, though, it was a reminder there are Makers out there. There are real humans who think up and create the things they love. Perhaps it's also a reminder that they can be Makers as well if they choose.

Here's what they wrote (the 5 year old, so bear with him):

The kids also mentioned that they liked tennis and that my oldest had recently lost a tooth.

And here's what showed up in the mail from Neil Numberman.

Note the missing tooth on the bug on the right.

There are no words for the awesomeness of this. This is how you get life long fans, my friends.

Thank you, Neil. You should use your twitter more. ;)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I was browsing the web today, as I often do, with my iPhone on the can. (Yeah, you do it too, don't front.)

A link to an interesting Q&A on Quora came along, so I clicked.

And got this.

Wow. This is bold, even for Quora.

I can peek at one answer, then presumably I'll be so enamored with Quora's walled garden that I'll rush to download their app.

The introduction of iOS 6 also introduced "smart app banners" as a way to let users know that your site has an associated app. The site author just adds a META tag and mobile safari handles the rest.

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=999">

Note that the giant DOWNLOAD THIS APP PLEASE arrow is all Quora and is not part of the iOS 6 Smart App Banner feature. This is equivalent to a YouTube video embedding a "please subscribe video" or a reporter pointing at an unseen 1-800 number added later in post production.

This implementation goes against everything on the web. You're not just actively preventing me from visiting your site by forcing me to log in, but you're also actively forcing me to download your app to access your server.

I don't want your app. Apps are too much like 1990's CD-ROMs and not enough like the Web.

The Web Rejects Hacks

There's a pay wall over at the New York Times, in case you hadn't heard. When you hit the Times enough times or in different ways you'll be prompted to buy a subscription, and it's apparently working pretty well. At least, better than you'd expect.

But the Times uses a number of techniques strike a balance between "open looking" and "totally not open." If you hit a Times link from Google or Twitter, it works. If you hit the times from an email, you get a pay wall. If you read the Times a lot, you get a pay wall. These techniques are wide and varied. They appear to look at your IP, use cookies, use HTTP_Referer, use URL querystrings.

However, the New York Times and other web properties are attempting to use the web in a way that the web doesn't like.  In fact, the NYTimes is actively playing Web Whack a Mole with those that would reject their pay wall.

The web itself actively doesn't like these hacks. It's not just that the people of the web don't like it, that's a social issue. It's that the technology underlayment doesn't like it.

Sites like this want to have their cake and eat it too. They want Google to freely index their content for searching, but when a person tries to actually READ the site they'll pop interstitial ads, use DIVs to cover the content and actively hide it from the user.

The uncomfortable tension for a business is that the web will never see content that's not indexed (by Google, effectively), but it's not OK to serve one piece of content to the GoogleBot and another piece to the live user. So, sites play tricks and the attempt to funnel us into usage patterns that fit their models and their perceptions. They HAVE to serve the whole page to all comers - ah, but do they have to actually let you SEE it?

What's Underneath?

Check out any Quora answer while on a mobile device not logged in. See that scroll bar there? The entire page actually loaded. I can scroll around! The white area is on top, blocking the content.

Don't believe me? Gobsmacked? Here's a screenshot of a View Source from my iPhone of this page. Sure the markup is really awful, but squint and you can see the content is there. All of it.

I love that my mobile data plan was used to download the full contents of a page that I'm not able to see.

No, I don't want your app. I want to use the web my way. You're not doing it right, therefore I reject you. You need to change your ways.

Yes, it's your prerogative on how you want to run your website, but I propose that just like ExpertsExchange and others before you, the open web will reject your chicanery.

I said Good Day Sir!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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