Blog Posts

The TPL is great but sometimes you have to work within a framework which schedules background tasks for you without giving you access to a Task of some kind. I had a situation like the following 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 private void DoSomeWork(CancellationToken token) { token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested(); // do lots of work } // some other code that might happen in a UI thread AsyncWorkScheduler.Schedule(()=> DoSomeWork(token)); I didn’t really have access to how the background task was scheduled, and to be honest I didn’t really care. What I needed was a way to wait for the work to finish, whether it finished by itself or if it was cancelled via the CancellationToken. I wanted to use await to avoid blocking any UI threads as well. ...

The task was simple. I have data on disk where the file sizes varied from 1kb to a couple of gigs. I needed to process the data and return the points from a method that returns an IEnumerable. The specific data file has a custom format, so I had to use a custom API to read the data. There was no async I/O option available unfortunately. Sounds simple enough. Here is my first version. I replaced the custom API with a simple file read operation. As with the custom API, I read pairs of data in block sizes I can specify. ...

Recently, I had a project where I was using Jquery Mobile within a UIWebview control. I had to implement linking to an id on another page (i.e. href=#topic ) while using jquery Mobile (jqm). The documentation warns you that this will not work out of the box because of the way the system navigates between pages. There are So you have to do a little bit of extra work to get that bit of functionality to work. ...

I’ve recently started playing with jQuery Mobile. And as some with very little experience with modern HTML/js/CSS, I found it overwhelming. v1.4 was released recently and while the actual libraries were published, the documentation left must to be desired. Granted I might have been trying an advanced use case that might not have been very well tested. My goal was to make use of their most excellant panel widget. I wanted to recreate the navigation tree as seen in their demo page. I have a bunch of pages on my site that I set up using their single-page template as a starting point. ...

I tried blogging using wordpress and blogger, but I didn’t like the amount of control it offered. Octopress was awesome, but I wanted to have something I could build and customize from the ground up. So I went back to the source and started with just jekyll. A fter fiddling with the default css, I’m going to use Bootstrap to take care of all the heavy lifting. All this responsive web stuff is pretty new to me, so I’ll get my feet wet this way. Not to mention playing around with LESS (which is really awesome!). ...