Getting Started With Ionic 2

Adam Costenbader Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile, Tutorial, TypeScript Leave a Comment

Everyone wants to have an “App” to represent them, their company, or just to perform some common task they might have in mind.

The problem with this is that there is so much to mobile app development. iPhone apps require that you have a Mac to compile them. Android apps have to deal with platform fragmentation. iPhone apps can mean working with Objective C, Android can mean Java– and if you aren’t a polyglot and fluent both these languages, you probably feel that mobile app development is quite the daunting task.

Luckily, though, there are other options to choose from – like the Ionic 2 framework. In this blog, we’ll show just how easy it is to get up and running with Ionic 2 by creating a reference mobile application. By the end of this blog, our application will have the ability to run in the browser, emulator, or be built-out to run on a device.

Coding For Fun: MIT Battlecode Challenge 2017

Joshua Robinson Articles, Community, Development Technologies & Tools, Educational Event, Programming Leave a Comment

I recently participated in the month-long MIT Battlecode competition where I programmed a team of virtual robots that competed against another team in a real-time strategy game. In this blog, I discuss some of the lessons learned during the programming competition. I was surprised how much of it could be used as a lesson in the real-world of programming!

We’re in this industry because we love programming and writing code. It is in this spirit that I suggest to all readers to consider challenging yourself and doing something similar to “code for fun” and improve your skills!

A Test-Driven Development Introduction to Angular 2 – Part 2

Matthew Brown Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Single-Page Application, Testing 7 Comments

In this updated blog post, we’ve built an employee directory using Angular 2 with unit tests, gone over some differences between Angular 2 and version 1, and introduced some of the features of TypeScript.

I originally wrote this article/application when Angular 2 was still in beta. Now that it has released officially, I have updated the source code to reflect updates made to the Angular 2 framework for release. My approach to get this working was to start from the new Angular 2 quick-start project, port in the original application source code, and refactor as needed to make things work. Let’s get started…

Setting Up Angular 2 MockBackend

Todd Leininger Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Tutorial 10 Comments

Todd was working on a client project developing one of the company’s first Angular 2 applications when he found that he needed access to the REST services before they were ready. He needed a good way to mock them up, so he set up a mock service for an Angular 2 application using MockBackend.

In this article Todd shows a step-by-step example of setting up a mock of RESTful web service APIs for an Angular 2 application using Angular’s MockBackend. With this method, he could then use that mock to work on the application before the real APIs were ready.

Using Toastr With SignalR

John Holland .NET, Articles, ASP.NET, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial 2 Comments

When you submit data to the server within a Single-Page Application (SPA), you are not performing the usual form post of data that would generate a new page load. Rather, you send the data using AJAX and are able to parse the response returned by the API using JavaScript and can act accordingly. In the past, this would most likely come in the form of an alert or populating a div with the appropriate message. This approach did what I needed it to do, essentially notifying the user of success or failure and allowing them to move on with their work.

Enter Toastr. Now I can have a non-blocking, consistent way in which to display these messages to the user, that are styled respective to the type of message it is. This is where the story gets interesting. So with this easy to use, non-blocking, consistent way of displaying messages, you can pair it up with SignalR and provide that same messaging from the server-side.

In this blog, we will demonstrate the use of the Toastr messaging library and how, when you couple it with SignalR, it can provide you with an easy-to-use, consistent messaging alternative.