Category Archives: Javascript

Backbone Fundamentals, Intro To Marionette, TodoMVC, And More

I’m very happy to announce that this week’s addition to Addy Osmani’s Backbone Fundamentals book is a chapter on Marionette! I was lucky enough to be able to contribute a large portion of the chapter to the book, including a … Continue reading 

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A WinJS SpecRunner: Automating Script Tag Insertion For Unit Tests

Writing unit tests with Mocha or Jasmine is generally pretty easy. Once you have a test runner set up, it’s not much different than any other JavaScript environment, really. But the trick to this is getting a test runner set … Continue reading 

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A Guest Appearance On Tekpub’s Knockout.js Series

Tekpub release their series on Knockout.js recently and I was fortunate enough to make a guest appearance! Now I know you’re thinking “why would Derick make an appearance in a Knockout series?!” But don’t worry – I’m not there to … Continue reading 

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Jasmine.Async: Making Asynchronous Testing With Jasmine Suck Less

I love Jasmine. It’s a great BDD-style testing framework for browser based JavaScript, and my preferred tool for doing that kind of work. But the asynchronous testing story in Jasmine is painful at best. Jasmine’s Async Is Painful Here’s a short example of … Continue reading 

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Asynchronous Unit Tests With Mocha, Promises, And WinJS

Before I get in to the guts of this post, you need to read Christopher Bennage’s post on how we have our Mocha test suite set up for our Win8 / WinJS project. It’s not the best setup, but it … Continue reading 

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Hands-on Backbone.js Screencasts

I’ve been talking about this for what seems like an eternity in Internet time: earlier this week my 4 part screencast series on Backbone.js was released through PragProg! It’s a hands-on, no-fluff walk through of all the major parts of … Continue reading 

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WinJS Event Aggregators And Observable/Evented Objects

In a previous post, I showed a very brief intro to using an application level event aggregator in WinJS. At the end of that post, I hinted at an option I was looking in to for creating localized event aggregators … Continue reading 

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A Quick Note On Pub-Sub / Event Aggregators In WinJS/WinRT

By now you know that I’m a fan of pub-sub / event aggregators, whether it’s .NET / Winforms or Backbone or whatever. For the last 3 weeks working on this WinJS / WinRT app with the Microsoft P&P group, I’ve … Continue reading 

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Partially Applied Functions In JavaScript

I’m finding myself doing more and more functional programming with JavaScript lately – especially in recent days with this WinJS project I’m working on, and the heavy use of promises that it encourages. This feels a little odd to me, … Continue reading 

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Want To Build Win8/WinJS Apps? You Need To Understand Promises.

If you’re not following me on Twitter, you may not know about my current project work. I’m working with Christopher Bennage and the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group to build a Windows 8, WinJS, Metro-style app with HTML, CSS and … Continue reading 

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