Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

FullCalendar jQuery plugin can help you show your own events in a calendar when the event data is in a specified format. If your JSON feed data follows a different schema, FullCalendar has a way for you to adapt the field names to match  FullCalendar's Event object format. The following snippet shows how a Azure Mobile Services generated data feed can have its field names modified so that it can be be hooked to FullCalendar. While you navigate across months in the calendar the relevant data will be pulled automatically. Link to code snippet on Github Gist In the snippet, start and end dates are UNIX-style dates. For the Azure Mobile Services endpoint to understand the date, it is converted to ISO 8601 format with the JavaScript  Date object's  toISOString() method.

Impressed with the way the MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy) SPA (Single Page App) tutorial uses the WAMS (Windows Azure Mobile Services) feature of  back-end as a service , I've started using it for a simple hobby project. While building it, I had to go through several interesting articles to fill the gaps in my understanding of Azure Mobile Services that were specific to my project. Rather than add the bookmarks to the existing pile, I thought I should organize the facts for easy future reference - The code name for WAMS prior to its public release was Zumo . That explains why header keys have Zumo in them. - Azure Mobile Services should have been called "Backend in a Box" or "Azure Backend Accelerator" . - Rather than creating your own RESTful service with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) to return JSON stored in a database, you can show Mobile Services what your data should be shaped like and it lets you query it dynamically - You can use Fiddler ...

Dave Voyles and Stacey Mulcahy have delivered a 7-part roughly 5-hour video course on Single Page Applications with jQuery or AngularJS . Key points from that course: - A single page application or SPA is a web application that fits on one page - A SPA can redraw any part of the UI without refreshing the page - They provide native-application like experience in the browser - Data is seperated from the presentation - Often includes templating, AJAX, routing - Loads data & views on demand - Examples - Twitter, email clients in the browser, Azure portal - Challenges:   ^ SEO considerations   ^ Browser history   ^ Requires JavaScript to be enabled   ^ Potential memory leaks - must deal carefully with JavaScript - Library vs Framework - A library has specific operations and it is usually organized into a class with specific functions (like image manipulation) while a framework defines the structural s...