The thing I’m most satisfied with in a long time is the introduction of a fake backend for my team’s frontend development. When you have another system that you depend on and that you have no control over, it’s always worth considering if that system can be replaced with a fake version for development.
This is especially valuable when this backend system(s) is highly configurable and can be in a lot of different “states” that you cannot control.
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After a long time of unreliable results with Web Compiler, especially in TFS, I decided to replace it with node-sass.
Web Compiler is an extension to Visual Studio that listens to changes in your .scss files (among others) and compiles them. It can also be configured to run as part of your TFS build. With our solution this has however been highly unreliable, where Web Compiler claims that files have been compiled, but the changes you made are not reflected in the resulting bundles.
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Quite recently I migrated this blog from WordPress to Hugo. Since I didn’t want to use a theme built by someone else, I had to add things like CSS and JavaScript myself. To be able to work with this locally in an efficient way and to be able to produce a complete build output in a reproducible manner, I had to automate the build steps. With WordPress I used Gulp for this, but I thought that might not be needed, so I made an attempt to do this using only npm scripts.
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Lately I’ve been working on switching to Azure Media Services from another video platform on my customer’s web site. I’ve found some challenges related to sizing of the player in different browsers with different playback methods (HTML5, Flash and Silverlight). Particularly the size of the player when exiting full screen mode has been flaky. I can’t say for sure that this isn’t the fault of the web site it lives on, but I don’t see anything indicating that either.
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If you have a Visual Studio project that uses Chutzpah for JavaScript tests, things recently got a lot easier with a long-awaited update.
Problem When all tests pass with the Chutzpah test runner everything is fine, but when you need to debug a test, things haven’t been as easy. Debugging the JS code in Visual Studio is something I never got working and never really cared about anyway. The best debugging tool for JavaScript is of course the web browser, but when selecting Open in browser in Visual Studio, Chutzpah has served the HTML test page (Jasmine in my case) through the FILE:/// protocol.
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