Article Stack 2nd March 2012

Capturing AUDIO & VIDEO in HTML5

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/getusermedia/intro/

A good introduction to getUserMedia in modern browsers which allows you to capture video and audio and to optionally stream their captured output to HTML5 audio and video elements. This is available in Chrome by enabling MediaStream in chrome://flags/

Nobody Understands REST or HTTP

http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-07-03-nobody-understands-rest-or-http

Another article which explains REST/HTTP stuff. There's some stuff in here about versioning using an Accepts HTTP Header value. There's a lot of good stuff in here and I'd love to have the time to prototype some of these concepts using ASP.NET Web API as a sample technology.

 

ASP.NET Web API Articles

Speaking of Web API, there's heaps of good content about it coming out now on a daily basis in blogs. Here's links to some good articles that I've read recently about Web API:

• Introductory walk through of an end to end sample by Scott Hanselman - [link]. Note: I loved the use of MvcScaffolding and Nuget here. I hadn't seen that before but it looks pretty useful for prototyping stuff quickly, particularly when you are going against a database.

• A two part series of articles which explains how Content Negotiation works in Web API [part 1], [part 2]
• Controller names for Web API controllers, the rules that they conform to, and the extensibility points for customizing the selection of controllers [link]

 

Scott Hanselman about The New Visual Studio Look and Feel

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNewVisualStudioLookAndFeel.aspx

Version 11 of Visual Studio is out and it has had a significant update to its look and feel. I think Scott nails it here and I believe that many people's first impression will be to say that they don't like it - change often hurts. In looking at the screenshots in Scott's post I actually quite like the new look. Scott also has some great tips for getting a better theme and for streamlining the look by reducing buttons and toolbars.

 

WinJS Observables

http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/02/25/windows-web-applications-understanding-observables.aspx

Finally, there's also been a new release of Windows 8 this week so it's timely to get an article from Stephen Walther about how Observables work in the WinJS Binding library.