Earlier this week, jQuery 2.0 was released.
I’ll save you the rehash, you can look to their site for information regarding the updates. The interesting thing I wanted to mention was that as of 2.0, they dropped support for IE 6, 7, & 8. This means everybody else is going to start following suit.
I often see developers on social networks asking if they really need to still support these browsers. I always take it as code for “If you guys stop, I finally can too.” So unless you have a strong user base stuck in a time-warp, I think this clearly marks the end of a very painful era – kind of.
CodeProject recently put out a poll that stated only 25% of developers are committed to still supporting the older versions of IE. Frankly, I think that number is going to get smaller really quickly. But again, it all depends on your user base and your needs. I also want to share one more statistic that I think you have to see.
NoSQL databases have gotten a lot of attention recently. This is primarily due to them being seen as scalable, great for working with documents, and generally a good option for people that have a huge amount of non-relational data. Think Twitter. Twitter is a great example of a service where a NoSQL solution can really shine. They have an enormous amount of data that isn’t very relational.
In the ASP.NET world, RavenDB is a popular option. For those of you brave enough to take the NoSQL plunge, I wanted to guide you through getting started and mention a few things. RavenDB can run in many modes.
The one we are concerned with when it comes to running it on a shared hosting account is Embedded Mode. This essentially embeds the RavenDB goodness into your application and will work on a shared hosting account. In fact, there is even a nuget package that you can use to drop it into your project.
Embedded mode even contains an HTTP server. However, this option will not work in a shared hosting account. So do not set:
UseEmbeddedHttpServer = true
Your best option would probably be to add something like this to your code:
#if DEBUG UseEmbeddedHttpServer = true; #endif
That way you could change your build type for either working locally or for production when you publish. For those looking for a fantastic tutorial and sample application, look no further than here.
The Web Tools 2012.2 update has been released. You can download it here.
This update is related to the tooling only i.e. Visual Studio and has no impact on the ASP.NET runtime. In addition to some of the things that help you better use the framework such as SignalR and enhancements to WebAPI that include support for OData, significant updates have been made to Visual Studios’ editor with regards to CSS and Javascipt.
Two of the Three Scotts posted in depth about this update. “Serious Scott Guthrie” had this to say. While “Funny Scott Hanselman” wrote this.
Last week we covered doing time lapse photography with jQuery-WebCam. This time I want to highlight some stuff that’s built into HTML 5.
HTML 5 gives you built in access to devices. There were multiple ways of doing this but I think the world has pretty much settled on WebRTC. Microsoft may complicate this matter a little bit but that’s the actual purpose of IE – to complicate our lives – so we are used to it by now.
So lets take a look:
<video id="videoPlayer" autoplay></video>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
var vid = document.getElementById("videoPlayer");
if(navigator.getUserMedia) { // Standard
navigator.getUserMedia({ "video": true }, function(stream) {
vid.src = stream;
vid.play();
}, errBack);
} else if(navigator.webkitGetUserMedia) { // WebKit-prefixed
navigator.webkitGetUserMedia({ "video": true }, function(stream){
vid.src = window.webkitURL.createObjectURL(stream);
vid.play();
});
}
});
</script>
The HTML 5 implementation is simple but it is also extremely powerful. To learn more, visit HTML5Rocks. To get straight to the fun, try this, this, or this. For those interested in really pushing things, you’ve gotta see this.
- Michael Ossou
Let me start off by saying we wont be using this to create a Tom Lowe masterpiece. Nonetheless, TimeLapse photography is pretty cool.
For those not familiar with timelapse, video runs at 30 frames per second. This means there are 30 individual frames taken per second of video. With regard to timelapse, we introduce a delay after each image is taken, thus time seems to go by faster.
I had previously looked into finding software that would allow me to do some TimeLapse stuff using my webcam, but I primarily found commercial products and eventually just gave up. So when I saw Gunnar Piepman’s post regarding the use of a jQuery webcam plugin to snap a photo via webcam, I was pretty excited. With a few changes, we could use it to take a series of images and later convert those images into a movie using VirtualDub.
Here is my first test timelapse:
I have included the complete project here. But I wanted to highlight a few things.
- Currently only Logitech HD Webcam C525 based webcams are supported.
- If you plan on using VirtualDub there is a tutorial here on building the timelapse.
- Keep in mind that VirtualDub requires the files to be numbered in sequential order.
If you make a timelapse, we would love to see it!
