Now I have ALL of the Microsoft developer certifications – long journey is over!!!

Now I own the full deck of the Microsoft certifications and I can sit back and relax (beer is in order . Unfortunately, in the startup world that I operate most of the time, it’s not very recognizable achievement, but it’s nice to put these logos on my presentation slide decks and, especially now, I have a very powerful bragging rights – I have ALL of the Microsoft developers certifications !!!

It was a lengthy path and, I should add, a very confusing one. It wasn’t very obvious what certification is a prerequisite to which one and, I must add, I’ve made a couple of mistakes on the road until I’ve discovered a developer’s certification map by Jorgen Thelin that put everything in order and cleared all the confusions.

Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials

Great article about forms and ways of implementing data validation for the web applications.

Highly advised to read.

Adding Watermark to GWT Textbox widget

Let’s see how we can improve our UI by adding some watermarked “spice”:

Let’s define the primary style for the text box (textInput) and the dependent style for the watermark (textInput-watermark):

.textInput {
	border: 1px solid #C9C7BA;
	font-family:Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size: 11px;
	padding-left: 2px;
	padding-top: 2px;
}

.textInput-watermark {
   /* background-image: url('images/overlay.gif');
   background-repeat: no-repeat;
   padding-left: 20px;
   vertical-align: middle; */
   font-style: italic;
   color: DarkGray;
}

Note that the watermark style can contain images as well (see the commented out piece).

After the styles were defined we need to add some code that will apply it to the text box. To do this I’m going to extend the default GWT TextBox. The trick is to hijack the OnBlur and OnFocus events. When the OnBlur is occurring, we’re going to show the watermark and OnFocus – hide it:

public class WatermarkedTextBox extends TextBox implements BlurHandler, FocusHandler
{
	String watermark;
	HandlerRegistration blurHandler;
	HandlerRegistration focusHandler;

	public WatermarkedTextBox( )
	{
		super();
		this.setStylePrimaryName("textInput");
	}

	public WatermarkedTextBox(String defaultValue)
	{
		this();
		setText(defaultValue);
	}

	public WatermarkedTextBox(String defaultValue, String watermark)
	{
		this(defaultValue);
		setWatermark(watermark);
	}

	/**
	 * Adds a watermark if the parameter is not NULL or EMPTY
	 *
	 * @param watermark
	 */
	public void setWatermark(final String watermark)
	{
		this.watermark = watermark;

		if ((watermark != null) && (watermark != ""))
		{
			blurHandler = addBlurHandler(this);
			focusHandler = addFocusHandler(this);
			EnableWatermark();
		}
		else
		{
			// Remove handlers
			blurHandler.removeHandler();
			focusHandler.removeHandler();
		}
	}

	@Override
	public void onBlur(BlurEvent event)
	{
		EnableWatermark();
	}

	void EnableWatermark()
	{
		String text = getText();
		if ((text.length() == 0) || (text.equalsIgnoreCase(watermark)))
		{
			// Show watermark
			setText(watermark);
			addStyleDependentName("watermark");
		}
	}

	@Override
	public void onFocus(FocusEvent event)
	{
		removeStyleDependentName("watermark");

		if (getText().equalsIgnoreCase(watermark))
		{
			// Hide watermark
			setText("");
		}
	}
}

Job trends for GWT and jQuery on a sharp rise

Gotta love this …

Recent “Application Patters for the Cloud” presentation for Boston Architect factory

 

Thanks for all the attendees. You’ve made this event a success! Thanks to all the organizers – without you this would have never happened.

 

You can find all the pictures are on Flickr and all the the presentations are hosted on the on Architect Factory collateral page (hosted on Azure Cloud).

You can access my presentation directly on the Slide Share:

 

Note: check out the price analysis article of “True Cost of Hosting” of a big web application deployments on Amazon AWS infrastructure – HotPads

Building fat GWT web clients [Intro] – How to create a GWT RPC client?

After months of working (mainly fighting with quirks of Java) with GWT I’ve accumulated so much knowledge on the topic so, I feel, it starts spilling over. I’m planning to convert this spill into a series of articles on how to build fat REST-full GWT web fat clients both on Java and .NET.

Here is the list of topics I’ll cover:

1. Building GWT fat client
2. Java REST-full Web services
3. .NET REST-full Web services
4. Internationalization and localization
5. IOC/DI
6. Unit testing and integration testing of all the components of the system
7. Build automation
8. and much, much more …

Here is a draft list of technologies I’ll be using:

1. GWT
2. Eclipse
3. Spring
4. Jersey
5. Tomcat
6. XStream
7. AJAX
8. JSON/XML
9. WCF
10. JUnit/TestND/NUnit
11. Selenium
12. Ant
13. TeamCity
14. and much, much more …

For starters, let’s see how to create a simple GWT fat client that talks to the REST-full Web services. As an example,

CodeCamp 11 Presentation: Best Practices in building scalable cloud-ready Service based systems

This Saturday I’ve held a “Best Practices” Zen-style discussion during the CodeCamp #11 in Waltham.

Some people were great, but I really expected to have more heated discussions and interesting “war” stories.

You can find the slide deck on the SlideShare

ADO.Net Data Services presentation @ NEVB User Group

Had a pleasure presenting ADO.Net Data Services (Astoria) to the New England VB User Group last Thursday.

Had a lot of fun and there were a lot of great questions.

Feel free to shoot me any questions and you’re welcome to download the PowerPoint slide deck and BeerFest  example source code (yes, we’ve talked about beer tastings .

The slides are based on the Mix’08 and PDC’08 talks.

Decided to give a try to SlideShare and published the presentation there as well.

John Resig on jQuery @ Waltham, MA

Last Wednesday John Resig stopped by to chat about jQuery. The room was packed so we had to join a second room. It was a pretty engaging presentation – loved it.

A couple of interesting links:

1. jQuery UI
2. jQuery Themes – Themeroller
3. Advanced jQuery on John’s blog
4. jQuery in Action book by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz with source code examples

And finally loved the Google trends chart of the adoption rates of all the major java script libraries that John mentioned (link is under the picture):

Note the change in my status – MCPD

This morning I have received a notification that I’ve passed one of the MCPD exams (others are still in Beta). Cool !!!