Tuesday, January 24, 2012

HTML5 for Mobile Article on DevProConnections

My article on HTML5 for Mobile Devices at Dev Pro Connections Magazine has now been published.
HTML5 is the umbrella term for the next major evolution of markup, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for web applications. HTML5 is becoming an ever-more important mobile development technology -- especially in light of Adobe's recent announcement that it's ceasing development on Flash Player for mobile browsers and increasing its investments in HTML5. To bring you up to speed on this crucial aspect of development, DevProConnections has covered HTML5 extensively in recent months, including my article "HTML5 for the ASP.NET Developer." In this article, I intend to provide a similarly comprehensive overview of HTML5 with an emphasis on features oriented toward mobile development. We'll dive into some specific examples of HTML5 features and focus specifically on what is available with mobile devices. I will focus on what developers can do today as opposed to what is part of the specific set of standards. I'll also mention where a product may have a slightly different outcome than expected. 
I would also like to thank the people that helped me with the article.  There were many people that read through the article and provided suggestions.  Some of them were Dave Wardand Spike Xavier.  I'm sure that there are other folks that helped that I forgot to mention, hopefully, they are not too upset over that.  Thanks to Dev Pro Connections for the opportunity to write the article.  I hope that you find the article helpful as you get into mobile development.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Mapping and Location with Monotouch on DevProConnections web site

My article on Mapping and Location with MonoTouch is now out and available on the DevProConnections web site.  Here's the intro to the article:
Mobile phones are by definition, mobile. A couple of interesting questions that come up when users are mobile are, "What's around me for dinner?" and "Where can I get gasoline?" If you are a retailer or a company, you want to tell potential customers that there is a retail location near them. If you are a user, you might also be interested in learning about how to go from where you are to a specific address. In this article we'll look at these and associated features, so that we can provide them to users via mapping and location services to users in iOS apps. 
I hope the article is valuable to you as you learn about the iPhone, iPad, and MonoTouch.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

My Artilcle on the UITableView with MonoTouch and the iPhone/iOS is now online

My article on the UITableView in the iPhone/iOS with MonoTouch is now available online. Hopefully it is of value to you. 

Article overview:
Data is what makes applications go. It could be a Twitter search, a running game score where you are playing against your friends, sales data, or any other type of data that users want to base decisions on. In this article, we're going to look at presenting tabular data to users in a UITableView. The UITableView has a number of visually attractive default styles that you can use. After we're done looking at these, we'll look at creating a custom UITableView layout. Along the journey, we'll look at some optimizations we can do that will give the user an improved experience. After we're done with this, we'll look at some strategies to get at various data sources, such as Representational State Transfer (REST), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), SQL Server, and the on-board SQLite database.
If you are wondering what MonoTouch is, check out http://xamarin.com/monotouch. It’s a great tool for .NET developers looking to get into iPhone development.