Peter Keating

Renewing expired self signed certificate for Adobe AIR application

Adobe AIR applications are signed with a digital certificate that offers assurance to the end user that the application is from a trustworthy publisher. Certificates can be obtained from trusted certificate authorities or self signed by you, the developer. Certificates from a trusted certificate

Setting up Entity Framework Migrations

This weekend I've been adding a database to the Moov2 website and thought it would be useful to share the process of setting up database migrations via Entity Framework. When working on a .NET project that relies on communication with a database it is

Moving Blog to Ghost

It's been a while since my last blog post due to a combination of work, sport commitments & enjoying a summer away from the computer. To pump up my enthusiasm to get back on the blogging horse I've decided to switch my blog from

CSS

Using CSSCSS with Grunt

This week a useful tool named CSSCSS popped up on my radar. Built by Zach Moazeni, CSSCSS is a Ruby gem that analyzes CSS and outputs selectors with matching rules. Currently at version 1.2.0, Zach's tool is great for highlighting areas of

Orchard

Released Active Directory Authorization Module 1.1 for Orchard

Towards the end of the last year we (Moov2) released our first open source Orchard module to the Orchard gallery. The module overrides the default authentication and authorization by using the currently logged in active directory user instead of requiring the user to enter

Web Performance

Reducing Page Size with WebP

Images often take up the majority share of content downloaded during page load on a website. Generally websites are heavier in weight nowadays, so any savings that can be made are welcome in order to speed up page loads for the user. When attending

Recommendations

Level Up with Podcasts

Since the start of the year I have been listening to podcasts in order to learn more about the web industry I work in. Listening to podcasts is a great way to keep up to date on the latest news, introduce yourself to some

Ant

Walking Skeleton for Web Applications

When beginning a new project at Moov2 we always kick off with a meeting to discuss tasks to be done for the first phase. The first task added to our task management process is always "Create a Walking Skeleton". I came across

Sass

Refactoring Sass for my Blog

Over the last couple of weeks I have been refactoring the Sass used to create the CSS for my blog. The original Sass for my blog was my first excursion into Sass and persuaded me to choose it over Less. Since it was my

AIR

Native JSON with Flex 3.5 and AIR 3

When Adobe released AIR 3 & Flash Player 11 one of the features introduced was native JSON parsing. If you have got your hands dirty with JSON before while developing for AIR you have probably either used the JSON decoding / encoding classes included in

Web Performance

Reducing HTTP Requests for Images using CSS Sprites

When developing websites nowadays there is a lot more to think about than the appearance, content and user interface. Performance should be one of the primary concerns for developers with the rise of mobile browsing giving more varied contexts for users visiting a website.

Sass

Giving Sass a go!

For the re-design of my blog I decided to give Less a backseat, letting Sass take the spotlight. Not familiar with Less or Sass? In a nutshell they're known as preprocessors that give CSS more dynamic features such as functions, variables and a whole

Orchard

Active Directory Authorization Module for Orchard

Orchard is a powerful, free, open source content management system (CMS) for the .NET platform. Orchard uses modules to provide reusable sets of components that can be enabled to give additional features to your CMS. These modules can be thought of as mini ASP.

.NET

Tips from my First Experience with Nancy

Predominantly all the .NET related work I do for Moov2 involves using the ASP.NET MVC framework. The framework is popular with so many resources available online to help with any issues that may be faced. However, for an educational side project I decided

WordPress

New Theme for my Blog

For the last few weeks outside of work I have been creating a new theme for my blog. I decided that when I had published ten posts I would set to work on a new theme and this is it. The fresh look has

CSS

Setting up my LESS Environment for CSS

Whenever I get my hands dirty with CSS, I always use LESS to assist. If you're not familiar with LESS then their own description summarizes it well. LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both

Flex

Sample Application in Apache Flex 4.8 & Robotlegs 2

As part of some research for an upcoming project I checked out out the latest offerings from the brilliant team responsible for Robotlegs. If you're not familiar with Robotlegs, it is a AS3 framework that assist with your application architecture helping with dependency injection,

Flex

Building Apache Flex 4.8 on Windows

On July 24th the Apache Flex project announced the first release of a Flex SDK. This was an important step in the handing over of the Flex SDK from Adobe to the Apache project led by the community. Apache Flex 4.8 essentially contains

AIR

Long running web service requests in Adobe AIR

I have been working on updates to a project using Adobe AIR. A big focus was converting remote procedure calls (RPC) to HTTP service requests for the method of communicating with the web service. The update was going well until hitting an annoying problem

.NET

Using CKEditor with Razor for .NET MVC 3

At work we have a project coming up that requires content to be constructed by the user. For content entry we will implement a WYSIWYG editor to give users a familiar set of tools to interact with. There are a plethora of WYSIWYG editors

Web Performance

Automated Lossless Image Compression via Ant

Entering your website into the brilliant PageSpeed tool offered by Google you may find that one of the issues it highlights is related to "Optimize images". Clicking into this section will present you with a list of images that Google suggests can

Web Performance

Speedy Gonzalez!

Just settling down ready to watch one of the best races of the Formula 1 season at Monaco. It really is the most exciting race even though it features the least amount of overtakes. The speed and precision the cars go around the narrow

AIR

Compressing Files in AIR

I was doing some re-engineering on a client project the other day and thought the implementation was worthy of sharing and hopefully could benefit others. The client project is a desktop application that uses the AIR runtime. Part of the application involves archiving a

.NET MVC Boilerplate

Introducing .NET MVC Boilerplate

At Moov2, my place of work, we have been hard at work on a project that I am going to introduce to you right now! .NET MVC Boilerplate! This project came about because there was a need for having an extendable base for which

WordPress

Never Satisfied!

So turns out I have some designer blood in my developer veins! Merely a week after finally uploading my WordPress theme, I have decided to give it a bit of a makeover. I decided to get up to watch the start of the Formula