You will need: IE, IE dev toolbar

Here’s how:

1. Load up your page
2. Open the dev toolbar and select the element using the aptly named element selector or in the DOM tree
3. You will see all the styles in the developer toolbar.
4. Right click the element in the DOM tree and selected Element source and style
5. A new window will open with the HTML for the element, nicely formatted
6. Click File>Save>Original HTML Source
7. Save the file where you want

Now you have your element with all the CSS that was applied to it in the main page in an external file to play with at your leisure!

[The pictures are from RSinteract, a product I am working on.]

Enjoy!

“She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion”
Accelerando - Charles Stross

via James Simm

Book Meme:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it at page 56.
• Find the 5th sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence on your blog along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Happened to have Accellerando in my bag but haven’t actually started reading it yet! I wonder what the intrusion is?

There was a lot of “Doom and Gloom” (TM) about the economic downturn alongside people telling you to start your own business and others seeming to be really successful in doing so. Which seemed to me like a slight contradiction in evidence.

Following on from last year another running theme was commoditisation. A couple of talks focussed on the “XaaS” idea including Simon Wardley’s, who did pretty much the same talk as last year but with some very interesting stuff about innovation this time… and less ducks which was a shame. Stefan Fountain was brilliant on this subject too and his energy and passion for his product - Soocial, a contacts storage service, really came across (3 of us signed up for the service in the audience!). We met him in Fox later where he was like a Hasselhoff sticker producing demon but really interesting to talk to.

Diggnation was good, not as much energy as last year, even Kevin and Alex seemed bored with the stories. Digg seriously needs a purge and overhaul in my opinion and Kevin’s conference openning talk pretty much outlined Digg’s plans for doing so, which was not very interesting to hear about really.

On the EXPO floor, Salesforce.com tried to sell us something every 10 minutes and Microsoft gave me a free mouse for being able to scale a circle in WPF. I R 1337. Oh and Surface was fantastic to play with. I can really see it taking off. I wish I’d had a video camera with me!

I’m not sure I’ll go again next year unless I’ve got a start-up by then. Which maybe on the cards but I’m saying no more about that. Not that anybody reads this anyway.

Thanks to Ryan and the Carsonified team for putting so much effort in though and the free journal was inspired!

A lot of the talks are online here if you want to watch, this is great because I can watch the ones I missed!

[Photos by James Simm Licenced under CC Share-Alike Attribution]

It’s that time of year again (I can’t beleive I’ve had this blog for a year and only written 6 things, including this!). The UK’s premier web conference - The Future of Web Apps, is coming back to London in 2008. I was there last year for all the Halo and Diggnation madness! It was brilliant. This year it’s even bigger and better with heavyweight speakers including Kevin Rose, Jason Calcanis, Mark Zuckerberg (!) and even Ben Huh from I Can Haz Cheezburger!. Should be very interesting.

There is still the developer and business tracks but this time around the expo is twice as big! There’ll be DiggNation again, but this time someone actually thought about it and it’s on the friday! Yay! No wandering around the conference hungover this time around. There’s also the Digg/Facebook meetup afterwards which should be cool.

I’ll try and blog throughout but last time the wi-fi was atrocious - hopefully they’ll have sorted it out this year! Thanks to the lovely people at Carsonified for organising this again.

Recently I’ve been following the great store front tutorial for ASP.NET MVC. To begin with it’s actually a tutorial about patterns and the new features of .NET 3.5 such as LINQ to SQL. In this respect it’s a great place to start learning to create .NET web applications. Rob Conery’s brisk but explicit style is excellent and really keeps you interested. I highly suggest any developer watch this series.

What it’s really taught me is how little I really knew about test driven development. The effectiveness of this technique once you learn to use it is really eye openning. It makes me cringe to think of all the semi-tested code that’s got my name on it that’s out in the world. I’m on a drive for self improvement at the moment and I’m really excited to get my hands on new tech like this.

On a side note I’m currently working with Visual Web Developer Express 2008. It’s a fantastic product with one glaring problem. It doesn’t support unit testing from within the IDE. At all. Nil. Nada. Not possible. Apparently, TestDriven.NET used to work but the developer - Jamie Cansdale, was forced by Microsoft to remove the support under a catch all clause in the EULA. This is quite old news but I’ve only just become aware of it due to my current experiments with the Visual Web Developer Express.

As an owner of Visual Studio 2008 who doesn’t currently have the disc to hand it’s pretty annoying having to stick with the NUnit GUI and this also means I can’t debug my tests. I understand Microsoft needs to protect their business but the supposed market for the Express products is beginning developers and by removing Unit Testing support they are forcing their users into bad habits.

I’ll make do because I can, but come on Microsoft! Sort it out!

There is a danger though, as I learn new techniques I immediately begin to see places in my current projects where I can use them. Developers also need restraint. If you had a snowboarding lesson, would you immediately go and enter a freestyle competition? There is a big problem with applying something you only used once in a tutorial. On the other hand if you never applied it how will you learn. This is always a big argument with management and developers in my workplace - and I can only assume other work places. When is it ok to apply your new technique while minimising the fear of introducing risk into the project?

The similarsticking point is…. *rumble of thunder, flash of lightening* refactoring. There is a beleif engrained into many schedule driven managers that refactoring will take until the end of time and will cause World War 3 if even attempted. The alternative being to just hack on top of hacks. The only way to avoid this is to just refactor when nobody is looking. It’s a faster way to fix a bug and eventually people will turn around to your way of doing things. As we all know refactoring should always be accompanied by unit testing in order to prove that the code is working the same way. I have run into a problem with this golden rule.

There never seems to be any unit tests in the first place and beginning to write these unit tests is some of the toughest work I’ve attempted in a while. It’s very difficult to get motivated to add something like unit testing to a project when management (and even senior programmers) are discouraging it. This is terrible practice. It promotes laziness and results in a project which is largely untested and is very difficult to sensibly refactor without spending a day debugging the bloody thing. I don’t necessarily mean fully test driven development for Pete’s sake, I just want to know my code is working! Is that too much to ask?! I have resolved to do everything I can to improve the processes in any project I work on. I’ve been guilty of inaction, of not saying what I think. Actions speak louder than words, and words work too. So from now on I will write tests for whatever I touch, no matter what. If there is no unit testing framework included, I will include it. I will endeavour to improve any code I touch and leave it in a better state than when I came across it. No more hacks. No more time wasted worrying that I should be doing things the right way not the fast way. In the long run it will be faster.

I’m just beginning to look at the .NET MVC framework which so far I am in love with. It’s so nice to see that good practice is finally being built into the project templates. Exposure to such shoddy practice means I can see how simple changes like this from the tool makers will make my life so much easier on maintenance. tasks two years down the line.

So thanks Microsoft, perhaps I won’t have a heart attack after all.

I have targets and deadlines of course: project deadline next Friday, got to find a new flat by next week, must spend less money. I think there’s a big difference between a goal and a target or deadline. Goals are funny things, they keep you directed and prevent you from stagnating in a pool of your own self loathing. Without a goal you just bumble around aimlessly achieving nothing, like a fish in an aquarium. Yes, you swim to the underwater castle, eat the food provided, take a loop around the pond weed and back to the damned castle. Always moving, never going anywhere. It is easy to fall into a rut and stay there.

When I was at university I had a goal, the goal was provided for me: achieve the best possible degree. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel but now? The tunnel seems endless and the light is so far along that it barely shows as a slightly different shade of dark against all the other dark. So I tried to think of goals and I came up with plenty. So I have a decision to make, now there’s lots of tunnels with their metaphorical lights but which one? Which will lead to my happiness and which is just another devilish trick to get me back in the aquarium?

To distract myself from this I tried to think of some ideas that I could work on and see if a goal emerged from any of these. I’m about to go to FoWA and they’re offering a five grand prize to someone who can design a kick ass AIR application. This grabbed me, I’d love a project like that. Something I can work on outside of work. However, I’ve a problem with AIR.

AIR sounds great on paper: “Get internet functionality on your desktop!” “Link in with your favourite web apps!”. The problem is I already have all this stuff! Digsby, links to Facebook and Twitter so why do I need Pownce? I’ve already got a music player that can link to the net too! I don’t know what’s so different about AIR. What the hell is wrong with the browser anyway? I like tabs, I like the customization, I like the interactive document feel of the web. It seems like a step backward and for some reason it reminds me of AOL back in the day, all those extra windows, but if I’m going to win five grand I’m going to have to overcome all these challenges!

So this is my short term goal… I’ve got a month to come up with an idea that will blow Monsieur Carson and his crones (read: some of the top people in the industry) out of the water.

Wish me luck and stay tuned!

Some of you may have heard of Stack Overflow, the web app Jeff Atwood over at coding horror has been working on for the past 6 months or so in collaboration with Joel Spolsky and various others. The aim of the project is provide a proper platform for programmers to exchange expert information for specific and general scenarios. If you caught the reference to expert sexchange you may understand that aforementioned godforsaken-hell-hole of a site has a similar premise.

While some of the information on expert sexchange is useful (there is clearly a lot of gaming going on) the site has degraded steadily since the policy to bully novice users into payment by hiding the answers at the very bottom of a very long page came into force. Stack Overflow, then, is the light to this dark, the yin to this yang, the day to this night, the police to this conman, the… ok enough of that.  The lack of good, readily available programming information is definitely a problem and it is becoming increasingly frustrating to find good answers using Google is becoming difficult particularly with new or obscure technology. The question is will stackoverflow be any better if it becomes full of junk?

Stack Overflow uses a karma like system combined with digg-style voting to enable a “question” to be answered in the best way possible and to maintain that information once a reasonable answer has been attained.  Once a question has been active and the answer has a good amount of votes then it is locked to voting by low ranking users. Of course there is still a wiki-style revision history as a double protection. Hopefully these features will go some way to protecting the site from the spam lords and vandals that plague so many community driven sites.

On a side note, there is now an Open Search plugin for stackoverflow enabling searching direct from the browser. This is an unofficial plugin created by a user. It is community support like this that will push stack overflow from being an interesting oddity to a full blown web staple.

Recently I obtained an invite to the private beta of this interesting little site. Though I had an idea of what to expect as I had been listening to the effort drenched podcast over at the stack overflow blog.
I was very suprised at how quickly Jeff Atwood et al had produced a working site but not only that, one that works well. I think the use of other web applications to speed bug reporting and enable the users like me to give feedback has done a great service to the site. It will be interesting to see what happens when the walls of beta fall and the world is unleashed on the site though. A social site is only as good as the people that use it. Will stack overflow succumb to the woeful fate of digg, youtube and so many before it? Will there be so much rubbish that the gold will be impossible to locate? Atwood’s karma system may save it for a while but for how long?

I’m about 2 weeks behind in this post, but I’ve had a bit of a hectic one. I was recently lucky enough to attend the Future of Web Apps conference and expo at the ExCeL Centre, London. It was geek heaven! 8 player Halo 3 in the middle of the Expo floor. Every speaker was a delight and I learned so much from them and fully appreciate the time and effort that went into their presentations. I was also one of the 1000+ people at Diggnation’s first UK episode! That was really good but I felt bad for Kevin Rose as he got completely mobbed at the end in a geek rockstar moment. Check out Ryan Carson’s Photos on flickr for pics of this.

Some of the speakers I really enjoyed were:

Om Malik - Om talked with Ryan and Micheal Arrington from TechCrunch about the direction in which they thought web apps were going and their own previous experience. The conclusion of which was “probably mobile but we’re not sure”.

Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress) - Matt talked about scalability and how they turned wordpress into the world wide phenomonen it is today.

Kevin Rose - Mr Rose had some very interesting points to make about community and referred specifically to the revolt of the digg community when the company received a C+D for hosting a story about the HD-DVD encryption key. Unfortunatly we missed the first half of this because there was some intense Halo3 going on!

Leah Culver - It was really interesting to hear Leah talk about Pownce and the challenges she faced developing it on her own in 3 months (!).

John Resig (Mozilla/jQuery) - Showing off some amazing new features of Firefox 3, John wowed the crowd with video embedded in SVG that could be dragged around and played on top of another video. He also talked in depth about where Firefox is going with Javascript and Rhino.

John Eizen and Eran Shir (Dapper) - The guys showed off a semantic search engine built using the User generated semantic APIs that Dapper can help create. There was a great moment during the questions where a semantic web researcher from the Open University blew a big hole in they’re presentation by pointing out that because the user generated the API that it wasn’t true semantic web and more a collection of hacks. This raised an interesting question about social semantics.

Dion Almaer (Ajaxian) - Dion showed us the workings of Google Gears and how it would really change the way we use the web. I’ve been a bit confused about the reasoning behind taking web apps offline and this presentation really cleared up some of the questions I had. I suggest you check this out soon.

I learnt so much from the conference and got loads of free stuff, I highly recommend it, there’s one in Miami in February and another in London this time next year, get down there!