The happy life of a web developer

Spent some of the weekend mucking about with getting a website to go with an iPhone and WP7 app I’m developing with one mister Tomas McGuinness, the whole idea is a wonderful combination of the MS stack of love with a bit of xcode thrown in for good measure.

What better way to experience new tech than to come up with a pet project and get stuck in, so far we’ve gotten down and dirty with

• MS Sync Framework: the backbone of our interoperability using OData and WCF Services.
• WP7 Silverlight: The Windows Phone app
• Silverlight RIA services: The rich internet application that also runs OOB (out of the browser on the desktop)
• MVC jQuery Ajax.
• HTML5: (low level stuff just now but really excited about this)
• XCode: iPhone app.
• IE9 Jump lists: quick site navigation.

Dusted off the old Photoshop shortcut, to modify a template and apply it to our MVC application, and it’s been a hell of a lot of fun, jQuery is pretty impressive at the visual end too, animations etc. are trivial and a joy to play with.

Site coming to an internet near you soon (if we manage to get some free time).

Now the techie bit, a sample how to slide in a panel/div.

@{
    ViewBag.Title1 = "Grass";
    ViewBag.Title2 = "Manager";
}

@section head {
    @*BEK: Add some animation using jquery*@
    <script>
        $(function () {

            $("#wel_topd").hide();
            $("#wel_topd").slideDown('slow', function () {
                // Animation complete.
            });
        });
    </script>
}

@section is used to inject some scripts into the head of the html page.

Then you see a little bit of jQuery that hides the div “Welcome to iFarm” in the screenshot above and slides it in from the top.