Dev, tech and other geeky stuff :)
On Wednesday, Facebook announced the new Graph API which enables developers to access Facebook’s data in a new and improved way. Another announce was Social Plugins. Those plugins let you add some of Facebook’s social features right into your website with little effort.
When your application needs to perform time-consuming operations, you don’t want the interface to hang, so you need to use a separate thread for this operation. Still, if the operation takes some time to process, you may want to give the user some feedback about its progress. The .NET framework provides the Thread and ThreadPool classes to create and manage threads. They can be quite powerful and are a must for heavy threading operations. However, if you want a simpler solution, the BackgroundWorker class is your friend.
Last month at the SXSW, Twitter introduced a new platform named @Anywhere for website developers. It was launched today. The new platform makes it easy to integrate Twitter features within any website with only a few lines of Javascript.
Have you ever visited a web page and actually had to take a moment to figure out where the content was because the page was so heavily loaded with non-content stuff? With the growing number of websites, with different designs, one may wish to simply read the page’s content without having to deal with all the extra stuff (navigation, ads, social features…).
CSS selectors are a powerful clean way of adding styles to your web pages. Pseudo classes are quite helpful when it comes to efficiently selecting which items to apply styles to. However, some interesting pseudo classes are little known. Chris Coyier, from CSS-Tricks, wrote an awesome article that introduces all the available pseudo class selectors available. Check out a demo of some of those selectors here.
So, you are building a C# application and need to parse a web page’s HTML. You could use regular expressions, but it seems more efficient to use a DOM-based approach. What if you could even take advantage of the power of XPath?
