Make your Blogger blog more responsive by auto-magically adding the SRCSET attribute to your images!

viaMacchina uses Blogger for its blogging platform. Blogger has been around for a long time, and it continues to be one of the best blogging platforms available. Out of the box, you get a mobile view to your blog. But, to be clear, even though the view is geared towards mobile devices, it is not responsive. Because of this, we are developing a completely responsive template to replace the out of the box Blogger template and mobile view.

Breaking All The Rules with WCF Full Circle

Recently while working on a project for a large government enterprise, I encountered a problem similar, nay, exactly the same as Scott Hanselman in his post "Breaking All The Rules with WCF." From the malformed WSDL to a custom WS-Security usernameToken without a password, I was dealing with the same issue.

Scott, as always, has done an incredible job highlighting the problem, and providing a solution, so I highly encourage you to read his post. I'm writing this post to cover the one thing he missed, creating a service that can be used to test this binding configuration against.

Open Live Writer is finally here!

Just over a week ago Scott Hanselman dropped the news that an open source version of the popular Windows Live Writer blogging application has finally been released. The Windows Live Writer application has been a popular publishing platform for years, but has not been updated since 2012. Earlier this year Hanselman ignited the communities interest by tweeting that talks were under way to open source the app.

@pzerger @rodtrent we are going to open-source live writer, so don't worry

— Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) June 10, 2015

The wait is finally over. You can download it here:

http://openlivewriter.org/

The application is still “old” compared to 2015 standards… but now that it is open source, I’m confident the community is going to run with it. Just in the past week the authentication for the popular Blogger service has been updated to work with the OAuth 2.0 spec.

Happy Blogging!

Let’s Encrypt!

Just last week LetsEncrypt.org entered public beta. This is newsworthy because SSL and TLS security are becoming more and more important for web applications, and the developers that create them. I won’t go into the details of the importance of using SSL and other stronger forms of transport layer security (TLS). There's a plethora of information on the web, as well as my favorite training site, Pluralsight.com. But, it suffices to say, if you are creating a web app these days, you need to be using SSL.

Asynchronous Task Containers

A few years ago I posted about using Action delegates to create logical containers to encapsulate functionality. This technique is a good example of DRY programming, and it is very useful in scenarios where you are performing similar operations with different parameters such as calling a database or service.