Blindspot support for Spotify is prematurely coming to an end

What is Blindspot?

Several years ago, in the heady days of *checks* July 2013, I posted the first commit to a project which would go on to be A giant part of my out-of-work development life.

Getting stuck in with AngularJS

In response to my LAST POST regarding using Angular with what could be considered the ASP.NET 2016 toolchain (Typescript, Bower, NodeJS and Gulp), I got some response saying that it was a little hard to follow. It was a pretty targeted poast aimed at ASP.NET developers looking at using a more modern approach to their JavaScript, but I thought I’d try my hand at my own getting stuck in post with AngularJS. This is aimed at people who are beginners or intermediate with web development.

This post contains rough getting started code, shortcuts, borderline hacking and alcoholic cocktails. Consider yourself warned.

ASP.NET and the JS 2k16 toolchain (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Bower)

Here is a blog post detailing my journey of discovery over 1 weekend into the new (at least to ASP.NET developers) JS tools that are being adopted by Visual Studio and are making their way into ASP.NET developers lives.

Note, this article contains changes of opinion, a word count that some viewers may find offencive, and beer. You have been warned.

Typescript 0.9.5, Chutzpah and Visual Studio update woes

Introduction

This post is kind of a story. The story of how a simple (seemingly) update to Chutzpah version 3.0 and by extension Typescript 0.9.5 made an otherwise normal development day into a war against a legion of Typescript errors, most of which weren't even in our code.

If you're here, there's a chance you've come up against a similar issue. Hopefully this post can talk you through to a happy solution.

Output to screen readers in Windows 8 and other .NET apps

Introduction

A long time ago, in a post far, far away, I went into using Microsoft SAPI as a way of reporting information back to a user using the in-built SAPI engine and briefly explained how this could be used to help people with a visual impairment as well as some other uses. If you are interested in focussing on accessibility in your desktop or Windows 8 apps and want another powerful tool in your arsenal, this post will tell you how to communicate directly with people's screen readers (if present).

Retrieving paths in Neo4JClient

This post relates to using Neo4J, Neo4JClient in .NET applications and how to retrieve paths from your Neo4J databases and turn them straight into POCO objects.

You don't have to be Facebook to use the graph

In this post/tutorial, I'm going to introduce graph databases. I'll explain what these new things are, why they exist, why you might want one and then I'm going to help you install one and get playing around with it!

SAPI: Output speech using the SAPI TTS engine in .NET

Today I'm posting about something which is possibly already covered elsewhere, but I'm covering it as part of a 'theme' that might appear in some of my postings, to do with making things accessible. If any of you immediately went 'ugh' and pulled a face, I hope you're not intending to work in software. Ever. Accessability isn't particularly hard and like real life, making things accessible in software requires a bit of thought and minimal time and in the case of software, probably no cost.

C# - Dynamically skinning your WPF applications

Far from making suggestions about how to inflict great pain and suffering on your WPF applications, this should make your applications that little bit more interactive and customisable. The way we'll be doing this is by dynamically loading in resource dictionaries into the Application's merged dictionaries. Lost? Don't worry, I was at first too. I'll elaborate what I know further down.

These methods are rather generic (in a non object-oriented way), but are set up to read through an application's subdirectory called 'Skins' and return all the skins into functional menuitems which will be put into a menu called themes. Change and adjust as necessary.

C# - How to make an MD5 hash of a string

Problem

Ok, so you're building an application that uses some kind of authentication for its users and you need to store their passwords. Are you going to just shove them in your database in plain text? Would you be happy if the various sites you use did that with your sensative data? I didn't think so, buddy.