Weekly digest #5

Targeting Multiple Platforms with Portable Code: Overview,Brandon Bray: In this post, we will look at how you can use Visual Studio to write portable class library assemblies that can run on multiple Microsoft platforms. You can create a portable class library that will run on Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox 360 devices. This post provides an overview of portable class libraries, and will be followed by more in-depth posts on portable code.

Is recursion really bad, Li Chen: After my previous post about the stack space, it appears that there is perception from the feedback that recursion is bad and we should avoid deep recursion. After writing a compiler, I know that the modern computer and compiler are complex enough and one cannot automatically assume that a hand crafted code would out-perform the compiler optimization. The only way is to do some prototype to find out.

How important is HTML5 Off Line, JoeStagner: There are a collection of facilities that are available to developers using HTML5 that enable an HTML5 app to run when no connection to the internet is available.

Integrating Knockout, JSRender, and Tweeter bootstrap with MVC4, Slava Khristich: MVC framework definitely changed the way we write our web applications now with clear separations between presentation layer, data and logic.With HTML5/CSS3 and jQuery we can see significant shift to client site implementations.New libraries like JSRender and Knockout brought even more separations of concerns to client site code.In this short article I would like to show an example of how I implemented integration between MVC4, JSRender, and Knockout.

JavaScript Data Binding Frameworks, Dan Wahlin: Data binding is where it’s at now days when it comes to building client-centric Web applications. Developers experienced with desktop frameworks like WPF or web frameworks like ASP.NET, Silverlight, or others are used to being able to take model objects containing data and bind them to UI controls quickly and easily. When moving to client-side Web development the data binding story hasn’t been great since neither HTML nor JavaScript natively support data binding. This means that you have to write code to place data in a control and write code to extract it. Although it’s certainly feasible to do it from scratch (many of us have done it this way for years), it’s definitely tedious and not exactly the best solution when it comes to maintenance and re-use.