Html5 on Strathweb. A free flowing tech monologue.

Native HTML5 push notifications with ASP.NET Web API and Knockout.js

Sun, 06 May 2012 14:19:08 +0000

The ASP.NET Web API project progresses at a rapid pace, and has already come a long way since the beta release. And as it is OSS now, it’s really great that we all can see the progress being made (thanks, MS!). So today we are going to build a native HTML5 push notifications mechanism over HTTP protocol, utilizing the latest exciting features of Web API (PushStreamContent), modern browsers’ Server-sent Events EventSource API and, of course, Knockout.js.

Few weeks ago Henrik Nielsen on his blog was kind enough to share some updates about the latest feauters available in the ASP.NET Web API. We are going to be using his sample code as the starting point to develop an application utilizing a real HTTP push messaging infrastructure. We’ll use that to build a browser-based multi-person chat, but the principles showed here could be used for pretty much anything that requires pushing content to the client.

Windows Phone 7 sports application with Apache Cordova, jQuery Mobile Metro and ESPN API

Wed, 02 May 2012 19:33:49 +0000

One of the finest news recently has been the announcement of jQuery Mobile Metro theme for WP7. The nice folks at Windows Phone Interoperability Bridges and Sergei Grebnov have released that (also available as a Nuget package) last week.

I immediately thought that this is one of the things that should be definitely checked out - after all jQuery Mobile is a wonderful technology for building robust mobile applications - and jQuery Mobile Metro seems to have so much potential! Coupled with Apache Cordova (formerly PhoneGap), it allows us to quickly and easily brew a mobile application that can be deployed to any platform. What happens with Cordova, is that you build your application with HTML5, CSS and Javascript - and then it’s packaged into an environment specific package and run as if it was a native application (using an embedded browser control). Things couldn’t be any easier.

So today, the plan is to build a sports application for Windows Phone 7 - using all the goodies: Apache Cordova, jQuery Mobile Metro and our good friend, ESPN API.

Full screen Bing Maps with HTML5 Full screen API

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 20:34:14 +0000

I recently got a bit depper into Bing Maps development, and I have been mesmerized by their richness and capabilities.

With that said, I had an idea that Bing Maps are one of those products that are simply tailor made for full screen viewing. So I thought, why not bring that to life with the new HTML5 Full screen API? Noteworthy, Facebook recently rolled out an update including the full screen API in their photo viewing service.

More after the jump.

HTML5 drag and drop asynchronous multi file upload with ASP.NET WebAPI

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:53:20 +0000

Today we are going to build a neat HTML5 file uploader using ASP.NET Web API and jQuery. We are also going to include knockout.js to keep the list of uploaded files updating smoothly in real time.

In addition to all that, we will leverage on HTML5 drag and drop events , as well as HTML5 File API, to provide the file input to the application. Finally, we will use FormData JS interface to build up the request, and we will use ApiController of our ASP.NET MVC 4 application to pick up the files and save them on the server using an instance of MultipartFormDataStreamProvider.

More after the jump.