The ole' blog

I've just had a bit of a clean up with the blog - re-tagged most of my older posts and changed the layout slightly. I apologise if any of your readers have been spammed with updates - just ignore them if so :)

I've also deleted some of my posts, most notable are the vast majority of the post relating to my bespoke nTier framework. Since I made them, I've made some significant changes, so the old posts don't really represent the end product any more, and will probably just confuse matters.

I'm still working on it, and I've made some good progress. I'm also learning a hell of a lot in the process and getting to play with some cool tools like T4 and MVC3, Razor and unobtrusive JQuery. Instead of blogging while I'm writing it, I thought I would develop it as a standalone framework you can download and play with yourself. It's about 85% complete, and although other commitments are taking over at the moment, I'm trying my hardest to get it finished.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been working with Entity Framework quite a bit recently, and I'm quite pleased to say that there's a lot of things in EF4.1 that I've already implemented in my framework. Although maybe not as robust as EF4.1 (at the moment), I'd like to think that by the time its finished it should be a decent alternative... I'm going to attempt to make my framework POCO compatible - it's not far off at the moment. Now, to think up a name for it... BokTier? :\

Popular posts from this blog

Handling uploads with MVC4, JQuery, Plupload and CKEditor

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get MVC to work nicely with various file uploaders while I was writing  RustyShark , and I have to admit it's been pretty frustrating at times. On the plus side, it's taught me a lot about how Microsoft MVC works behind the scenes, and allowed me to play with quite a few different uploading tools that're out there. My upload page on RustyShark has quite a complex model - each review is related to multiple Formats (PS3, 360, DVD, Blu Ray etc), each review / format combination can have multiple images associated with it, and each image has additional meta data attached, such as a caption and an upload date. The upload form is created using a combination of Editor Templates, JQuery and AJAX. I will be stripping down any examples to their bare bones to make things a little clearer. This article assumes you are familiar with MVC fundamentals such as creating controllers, views and models within Visual Studio 2010 or later, you
Read more

Getting Unity 3D working with Git on Windows

Image
Git is a brilliant, yet peculiar beast. It has the most flexibility of any of the VCS's I've used, and it's extremely powerful and quick once you get used to how it works. Suffice to say that I've fallen in love with it over the past year, for both personal and commercial projects, and online services like github and bitbucket just enhance the overall appeal of it. I therefore want to use it as my VCS of choice when developing games... but those who have tried to get Unity and git working together will probably either be dead by their own hand, or crouched in a corner, rocking back and forth in the foetal position. Unity3D is an entirely different, and possibly more peculiar beast. It's a great tool, and the editor is feature rich, but it's source control compatibility is weak to say the least. I don't know if this is through necessity, or the marketing people at Unity have pressed the developers to make it as complicated as possible in order to sell their
Read more

Generating a self-signed SSL certificate for my QNAP NAS

I recently bought a new NAS (Network Attached Storage) to deal with some of my remote work requirements. Initially I was going to build a server to do the job from spare parts, but I was concerned about power consumption and of course the amount of time it would take to build, configure and administrate. In the end, I had a little look at a few reviews and I decided on the QNAP 219P+. I can honestly say without a doubt that it's one of the best pieces of kit I've bought for a while. It's very feature rich, (almost) everything seems to work perfectly, the interface is well organised and easy to use, and maybe the most important part - it's fast . I'm having a few issues getting the WebDAV service accepting connections, though I think it's Windows' fault, not the QNAP. It's a little on the pricey side for home users, but I didn't mind paying what I did considering how good it is. One of the things I wanted to do was secure my remote communication w
Read more