Incremental Developments

I’ve a been working on the plan to add cheat sheets for the major technologies I work with. I think it would be worth adding example code and projects. Rather than hosting the code on my site I’m going to try using a git repo hosted on Bitbucket.org.

What is more interesting is that it may work both as another off site code backup too, With the added advantage of being able to share projects amongst collaborators.

I’ll use the example hosting as a test.

For the actual cheat sheets I have started, I’m thinking of using pdf’s rather than pages in WordPress going forward.

The nest set Im planning are on silverlight. If it works for that i’ll move the old stuff over too.

So that was a little odd. I’ve been working as a permi for a bit. My wife and I moved back to Scotland, mostly to be nearer to friends and family.

I couldn’t get any contract work up here and found it slow even to find a permanent position. I will say that once the new financial year started, the number of responses to job inquiries ramped up. So for future reference look in march – may.

The job I finally accepted required no less than 4 interviews after the basic telephone screening.

My wife however seemed to end up having an interview, followed by an interminable wait while the organisation she had applied to, decided to reorganise. This on more than one occasion.

So with wages being much less north of the border, both of us needed to be in work to cover the bills.

Luck presented an opportunity for a contract back in London, and payed enough that it would cover all the bills plus the flat rental. So it’s back down to the smoke for us.

Also the odds on Sheila getting work down here are much higher.

Now that we have set up the move it seems oddly like going home.

What a sad alphabet soup of acronyms this post has for a title…

Just a quick note on using Json ajax requests with asp.net mvc 3.

Adding a hnadler for a json request to a controller is easy, the return type is just JsonResult, and the controller’s Json method will handle the serialisation of the data.

The only gotcha is that by default, get will be disabled for json requests.

If you want to use the method withoutchanging that default, you cant use $.getJson, you need to use $.post instead.

$.post("<url>",
       "<data>,
       function (data,ststus,jqxhr) {
           /*handle the result*/
       },
       "json");

It is worth remembering that you can use the “Promise” interface from jquery 1.5 on to add an error handler, or it fails silently:

$.post("<url>",
       "<data>,
       function (data,ststus,jqxhr) {
           /*handle the result*/
       },
       "json").error(function(){/*error alert*/});

and if you need to parcel up the form for the data use $(“form selector”).serialize();

Continuing with the .Net development under VMware, One useful tip if you use the git bash shell (here) for your version control on windows, and have to access remote repositories over ssh, and you want to skip entering the passphrase at every operation, just do the following:

eval `ssh-agent`
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

assuming you generated the key in the default location…

You will be asked to enter your pass phrase once and that is it for that session.

Note that this will only work for the shell you run it in, spawn a new one and you need to repeat the process.

On the mac, my ssh key pass phrase seems to be remembered, I’m guessing in the keystore but I haven’t checked that.