Issue: 2013 - May/June

May/June 2013 Editorial by Rod Paddock

Apps are the biggest change in SharePoint 2013. Over the past many years, SharePoint developers have been trying to figure out how to make applications work securely with each other, without users dealing with excessive passwords. Ideally, enterprises should have the confidence that installed software isn’t doing more than what they think it is doing. All this is being solved with SharePoint Apps.

Almost every programmer knows (unless you have been living under a rock for the last five years or so) that you should be using classes for all of your programming. You should also be using collections of objects instead of using a Data Reader, a DataSet, or a DataTable in your applications. The reasons for using collections are many and are explored in this article.

In virtually every CODE article I’ve written since 2004, the proverbial 99% of the content has been based on things I’ve done in production. Well, every technical person has to “go back to school” at some point,-and my return to school has been in the last month as I finally took a look at SQL Azure. This article represents my findings as I recently finished “kindergarten” and am now ready for the trials of first grade!

TypeScript is a new Microsoft offering that seeks to change the way we write JavaScript. As the name implies, TypeScript associates a strongly typed layer in conjunction with JavaScript. TypeScript also associates an object-oriented layer with JavaScript.

Menachem Bazian argues that building a robust PHP web application is best achieved with a lightweight framework like CodeIgniter, which he demonstrates by creating a user-logs system that records login/logout events and presents them in a user-friendly web interface. He walks through designing a MySQL-backed MVC application, using CodeIgniter’s ActiveRecord for clean queries, leveraging helpers for reusable functionality, and employing views to modularize UI components. ...The piece also covers practical setup (virtual hosts, .htaccess, profiler) to keep development lean and productive.See More

In this article, you will create a CODE Framework RESTful service and an iPhone application from scratch. For the client side, you will utilize XCode (yes, you’ll need a Mac!), which uses Objective-C as the primary language. This article won’t teach you the language; you need to know the basics of Objective-C. Even if you don’t know anything about it but want to code right away, read the article “Building a Twitter Search Client on iOS,” by Ben Scherman, available for al...l CODE readers in the Xiine application for Windows, Android, and iPhone. For the database, you’ll use any instance of SQL Server 2008. The service will be written in C#, using the latest version of CODE Framework, available on http://codeframework.codeplex.com, where you will find not only the download link, but also a lot of useful information.See More

Sharon Cichelli’s Hello, Arduino: Write Code That Interacts with the Real World introduces beginning developers to the Arduino as an approachable entry into physical computing. The article guides readers through the core idea of building programs that sense inputs (like pushbuttons) and produce outputs (such as LEDs and servos), using simple sketches in a C++-extended language. By walking through a blinking LED, a button-activated circuit, and a servo example, Cichelli e...mphasizes hands-on experimentation, hardware literacy, and good habits to grow from tinkering to more ambitious, interactive projects.See More

Software applications have a lifespan. Some, like utility applications that do nothing more than patch an existing application to fix a bug, are quite short. Others, like games, live only slightly longer. Then there are those applications that live on for decades, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Internal business applications that are used to automate and track processes often have long lifespans as well. As developers, we add to or adjust the application’s u...ser interface to account for new features, but rarely do we reconsider the interface as a whole. Why? Likely because we get used to the original user interface we created and don’t see any reason to change it. But complacency is generally not viewed as a virtue.See More

Writing software is hard, particularly when the schedules keep programmers’ “nose to the grindstone;” every so often, it’s important to take a breather and look around the world and discover what we can find. Ironically, what we find can often help us write software better.