For a while now, Microsoft has demoed and spoken about their highly hyped WebAssembly framework that aims to blur the lines between front and back-end programming. If you are a .NET developer or just like to keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to new frameworks and web tech, you have most likely heard of Blazor. If not, you can keep reading and just smile and nod so people don’t find out you’re behind the times.
Well, this is only mildly infuriating. The Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 team have released the patch notes for an update coming in seven days for the game, which many hoped would fix some of the dismal performance issues in the game. Well, it turns out performance optimisations are taking a backseat to primarily fixing the installer… The patch notes header, “Install Issues” has the largest number of items in it: The install process will no longer be blocked after a partial decompression of a package The install process will no longer be blocked when a local user account includes non-ASCII characters The install process will no longer be blocked after a failed connection to servers The install process will no longer display an empty onboarding screen under certain conditions The title will download a critical missing/deleted package to access the main menu even if the save data preference is set to offline (when an internet connection is available)
With Aurelia 2, everything has been reimagined from the ground up. While the syntax and way you build applications is largely the same as Aurelia 1, there are some key differences and one of those is lifecycles. When I say lifecycles I am talking about component lifecycles and router lifecycles. If you need a handy reference for what lifecycle you should use, you just found it. This will not cover all lifecycle methods, just the ones that most people would want to know about such as dom attached and where you should load data from an api.
The latest trend in web design and development is no-code. Well, it’s not exactly latest, the trend has been around for a while now. You can go back to the early 2000’s and point out numerous software apps and web offerings that would fall under the no-code umbrella. However, it’s hard to argue that 2020 besides being dominated by a highly contagious respiratory virus pandemic, no-code has been thrown around a lot. If you visit sites like producthunt, you would know what I am talking about.
I see a lot of questionable blog posts and articles out there about Javascript. And, I should know, I have written some of them myself in the ten years I’ve been blogging on this site. However, over the last few years since the rise of Medium and Dev.to, I have noticed a few articles (I won’t link or name any) which go along the lines of this: Stop Using For Loops and Use map, filter and reduce instead
I have a lot of ideas, in notebooks, in the form of half-completed side projects on GitHub and my computer. Shipping has always been a problem for me and I rarely share ideas or insights into anything, but today that is all changing. I am launching The Ideas Digest, a newsletter which will send an occasional newsletter about a particular idea or topic. It’ll provide research and insights for how someone might build a product or offering around the idea or problem.
Apparently, rumours of Meteor.js demise have been greatly exaggerated. Back in March 2020, the Meteor team released version 1.10 which saw a plethora of updates to the universal app platform. Admittedly, it has been quite a few years since I have worked with Meteor. I remember trying it in the early days and being wowed by its ability to allow you to build applications that bring the front and back-end together without needing to configure anything.
At work recently, I had a use-case where I needed to show a preview of some HTML dynamically sent from the server inside of an iFrame. It is quite possible before you found this blog post, you found a solution that looked something like this: iframe.src = 'data:text/html;charset=utf-8,' + encodeURI(html); This will work for simple HTML and instances where the HTML isn’t overly long. But, if your use-case is like mine, the HTML the server is returning is massive. In my case, I had base64 encoded images making the returned HTML huge.
I have been a Firebase user for quite a few years now, since 2016. In that time, I have seen Firebase grow and change as a product. I have also seen the problems people have had with it, as well as the successes. Googling opinions on Firebase will yield mixed results. Some are for Firebase and its all-inclusive platform offering features like authentication, a NoSQL database called Firestore, storage, hosting, Firebase Functions (basically AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions). Others advise against Firebase because of issues around costs and how the use of resources (reads and writes) are counted.
I had to implement some testing logic recently where I wanted to wait for a heavy page to load and for specific elements to become available. I knew I wanted a function that polled the page and returned true if it found the element or rejected if it didn’t. I actually looked some a pre existing solution and turned up a blank. There are code examples out there, but some developers have created some over engineered solutions using things like proxies, mutation observers and other convoluted ways of waiting for elements.