Articles by K. SCOTT ALLEN

Trying Out JavaScript v.Next

ECMAScript Harmonyis the future of JavaScript, and something you can experiment with using the stable builds of Chrome (my machine is currently running 18.0.1025.152 m, but that is subject to changeat any minute).The first step is going intochrome://flags,...

A Refactoring Experiment

By K. Scott Allen

Soon I'll be giving a group of developers some code and asking them to do some refactoring.The bad news is the code is hard to read. Some might say it's intentionally obfuscated, but let's not assume malice right away.The good news is there are six working...

The Bar Is Even Higher Now

By K. Scott Allen

It's been just over 8 years since Michael Feathers wrote "The Bar Is Higher Now".I don't care how good you think your design is. If I can't walk in and write a test for an arbitrary method of yours in five minutes its not as good as you think it is, and whether...

jQuery UI Autocomplete and Automatic Form Submit

By K. Scott Allen

It's a common to automatically submit a form after a user selects an item from an autocomplete list. The keyword here is "select" \u2013 it will lead you to handling the select event of the jQuery UI autocomplete widget.someInput.autocomplete({ source:...

Quacks At Work

By K. Scott Allen

"The Lords of Finance" includes a story about famous economist John Maynard Keynes, who was diagnosed with a chronic cardiac condition and needed medical help*.In 1939, he fell into the hands of a Dr. Janos Plesch, a Hungarian Jewish \xe9migr\xe9, who, according...

What's Wrong With This Code? (#29)

By K. Scott Allen

Here is some code similar to other code I've seen that has a severe bug. The Entity Framework model configuration is setup to allow optimistic concurrency checks via a movie's Version property.public classMovie { public virtual intID {get;set; } public virtual...

A Simpler MapReduce with MongoDB and C#

By K. Scott Allen

Continuing from theprevious post about MapReduce with MongoDB, we can clean up the code a bit using an extension method that takes a single string parameter.vardb = server.GetDatabase("mytest"); varcollection = db.GetCollection("movies"); varresults =collection.MapReduce("CategorySummary"); foreach(varresultinresults.GetResults()) { Console.WriteLine(result.ToJson()); } The...

Whiteboard Architecture

By K. Scott Allen

It's been my observation that the worst architectural decisions are made when technical people meet by themselves in a room with a whiteboard. I'm not saying the decisions are always bad, or wrong, but the plans and rules that come back to bite you consistently...

Custom Slider Value Display with jQuery UI

By K. Scott Allen

The jQuery UIslider widgetdoesn't display it's current value by default. However, you can tap into theslideevent and grab the current value from the second parameter passed to the event handler. The second parameter in a jQuery UI event handler is typically...

Readable DOM Ready Event Handlers

By K. Scott Allen

One reason some people don't like JavaScript, I think, is because idiomatic JavaScript favors fewer keystrokes and CPU cycles over readability. There is a large amount of script code that is hard to read, and even harder to maintain and change.Take, for example,...