John Papa

Long ago, in a galaxy far far away I met with  Jon Galloway and Jesse Liberty to brainstorm on some MVVM ideas. I had forgotten about this video recording, and I guess they did too. But now, many months later they dug it up and you can now check it out at Channel 9 on their show, The Full Stack. more

If you do anything new today, take 3 minutes to get to know jsFiddle. Why? Because if you do any web development then you’ll benefit from using it. Why 3 minutes? Because that’s all it takes to to grok what it does, how it works, and to write your first “fiddle”.  If you have more than 3 minutes, I encourage you to read my short post on jsFiddle in Papa’s Perspective. Here is a quick sample: more

A few weeks ago I had a great time talking with Carl and Richard about the client development landscape. We chatted about everything from XAML, to Windows Phone, Windows 8, to Silverlight, to HTML5, to JavaScript, to KnockoutJS, to and JsRender. That discussion ended up being on this week’s DotNetRocks episode #730. I’m finding that the client landscape is an extremely interesting area with a lot … more

I like my Windows Phone. The UI is awesome and I’m itching to get the Lumia 900 when it comes out. The iPhone interface feels a bit dated to me. But the lack of good apps is killing me right now. I have faith in the Windows Phone team though that 2012 will be a big year and they’ll continue to rise. Here is an article I wrote for VS Magazine that states what I deem as the 3 challenges WP faces … more

Knockout 2.0.0 was released last night to the web! You might have been tinkering with the 1.3.0 RC recently, but it has been renamed to 2.0.0. Steve lists a few reasons why he went this route and I fully support the decision to jump to a new major version number. If you look inside to see what he added and changed for KO v2.0.0 you will see a pretty dramatic and powerful set of improvements. I … more

Silverlight 5 was released to the web yesterday, finalizing the feature list that many of us have been tinkering with in 2011. I’m excited that a product I had a very small part in shaping is now out. The team members are amazing and did a fantastic job amidst unusual circumstances over the past year, and I applaud them all. Fantastic job Silverlight crew! The question many have already asked me … more

This month’s Papa’s Perspective shows you how to use some of the fundamental aspects of the HTML5 canvas to draw. I go over some 101 level functions such as arc, beginPath, lineCap, lineJoin, lineTo, lineWidth, moveTo, stroke, strokeStyle and more. The source code you can download shows you how you can draw letters using these functions, and includes some scaling calculations to make it all a bit … more

I recently had an opportunity to review an advance copy of Julie Lerman and Rowan Miller's new book "Programming Entity Framework 4.1 Code First". In short, this is a fantastic book that is a quick read. Read more about my review in Papa's Perspective.

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