Tricks for Getting Around the ‘XMLHttpRequest Cannot Load’ Security Limitation in JavaScript

Some number of years ago web browser developers came up with the idea of allowing JavaScript to pull data from other sites into a web page on-the-fly. That day AJAX was born! Short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, this technology provided a mechanism for web pages to change their content without requiring the whole page to be refreshed. It was a great idea and has revolutionized some of the way ...

Serializing and Deserializing XML Through a URL Endpoint in C#

Recently, at the company I work for, I had to merge two very different web sites together. While both use C#, that is where they pretty much stopped in similarity. We were exploring ways to have them talk to one another very plainly and transmit only minimal amounts of data. One website was a store which was built around the idea of digital products and it had to talk ...

Quick Tutorial: Building Menus Dynamically With the MenuStrip Control in C#

One of the easiest ways to build a menu on Winforms is by simply dragging and dropping a MenuStrip control from the toolbox on your form and then go to town filling in menu text and attaching events. Most of the time this is the way to go and works for the majority of programs out there. What we will cover this time around is just a few examples of ...

Some Coupling Needed in Software Systems

The name of the game in software development is to write code that is easily readable and maintainable. To do this programmers have been practicing the art of loose coupling and high cohesion. For those not familiar with those concepts, coupling is the degree by which one piece of code relies on another piece of code to function. For instance, a car relies heavily on an engine to function. This ...

An Analogy Is Worth a Thousand Pictures

The famous saying goes that "a picture is worth a thousand words" but when it comes to software development, an environment where you are expected to communicate with business people, I found the saying "an analogy is worth a thousand pictures" to be more applicable. Probably ever since the invention of the computer, those who work to develop software have had a tough time explaining its concepts to business people ...

My Experience With The Wireframe Tool MockingBird

Recently I have been put in charge of a company's design of new mobile site. I have been doing web design for quite a few years now and have been doing some mobile dev a fair bit recently as well. As part of this new project I wanted to get down some quick website wireframes that I could present to the senior staff, so they could make the crucial decisions. ...