I need to write this somewhere or I’ll forget how to do it. I’ve recently started using branches in hg for my target environments instead of using separate repositories as is recommended by Kiln. I got a request to produce a list of changes that would be going into the next production release and knew […]
A few months ago I put up a site http://hypermediaapi.com with the intention of using it as place to aggregate links to all things hypermedia related. I built the site using Web API because a) I know how to use it, and b) I wanted to prove a point that a Web Site is really […]
A few of us keep complaining about the way the HTML5 specification is written. The argument we are given is that the HTML5 is written in a more prescriptive form to reduce the ambiguity that exists in the more traditional “declarative” style RFC documents. I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading specs over the […]
I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed on the Deep Fried Bytes podcast about practical uses of hypermedia for desktop and mobile applications. Hypermedia is one of those topics that we are all familiar within the web browser, but it tends to get forgotten when people start writing client applications. There are many ways to leverage […]
I see many questions on Stackoverflow and the MSDN forums where people are having difficulty because the objects they are trying to return from there API are not being serialized as they expect. Consider you have an API action that looks like this: What are you supposed to do to debug what is going wrong […]
When talking about REST, the conversation usually boils down to coupling. REST enables distributed components to evolve independently over long periods of time, and it does this by constraining where coupling can occur. I’ve made this pitch a thousand times with the blind assumption that everyone had the same understanding of the term coupling. If […]
Ever since Microsoft’s first efforts to deliver a REST style framework in .net, back in 3.5, there has been a continuous stream of questions that has asked: how to I add a service reference to that API? How do I generate a client proxy? How do I access the WSDL for the REST service? Can […]
I’ve been writing an alternative to the MVC routing mechanism for ASP.NET Web API based on prior approaches that I have worked with. I’ll blog more about that in the future. Part of my motivation for writing this new router was because I didn’t know how to do what I wanted to do with MVC Routing and […]
Much of my career has been spent with me as the most senior developer on my team. It has its pros and cons, I have learned how to figure stuff out on my own, but I have had to re-make many mistakes that I could have avoided. However, one of the most memorable pieces of […]