I've had a web application written using iUI for a couple of years now. It's been stable and rock solid, and I really appreciate the leg up that it gave me. However, this weekend I converted away from iUI to jQueryMobile. I have another application in production already using jQueryMobile, and it is absolutely an amazing library.

The reasons I went with this move were:

• iOS 5 had substantial changes to Safari and my existing application is broken in many places. Instead of spending time debugging and fixing something 2 years old, I figured I'd take the time to port to jQueryMobile.
  
• I've had to leave iUI at version 0.31 for this entire 2 year period. When they started development on the 0.4 version, they changed form submissions to break if you had multiple form fields with the same name. I absolutely had to have this capability in order to support ASP.NET MVC list binding. I reported the issue in the forums, and it didn't get much attention. Sure, it's open source, but if I have to chase down bug fixing in a framework I'm not intimately familiar with, it's a negative.
  
• There is no easy way with the released version of iUI to do things like jQuery calls, hook events into the page create/show and hide/destroy. Sure, there are code modifications you can find on the web, but it's a forking nightmare and tough to maintain (is this for 0.31, 0.4, or 0.5? does it require other extensions or modifications? etc.).
  
• From a non-technical perspective, the roadmap of iUI has been all over the place. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was originally slated for moving 0.4 in to release status in like June of 2009. It's been pushed out over and over again, trimmed in scope, and there just doesn't seem to be traction or consensus to move the product forward. In contrast, jQueryMobile is looking to have a 1.0 release in the next few weeks with constant releases over the past few months.
  

Take a look at the StackOverflow ad for more details. We're hiring 2 Senior developers and 2 Junior developers (and more: QA, BA, and a GUI developer). It's a fun environment with a strong technical team, so we're looking to keep the team strong. If you're around the Milwaukee area and are interested in more details, let me know.

I've been searching for a comprehensive online backup solution for quite some time. I want to follow the sage wisdom I heard from Alex Lindsay about the 3-2-1 backup rule. With Windows Home Server, I had finally got all of my computers backing up automatically, and it has actually aided in one restore of a dead hard drive. But not having an offsite backup has gnawed at me for a while. What if someone steals my computer stuff from my house? Fire? Tornado? All of those backups are useless in those cases.

I looked at Carbonite and Mozy, but they both refuse to backup WHS. This is imperative to me because I store my media (pictures, videos, musics, etc.) on a share on my WHS device. Having to store those files locally just to please a backup service was not appealing to me. Amazon S3 was going to be too expensive. Other options seemed immature. So I waited. And I waited.

Along came CrashPlan. They embrace WHS. They support Mac and Windows. They have an iPhone app (and Android) to check on things on the go. There are a ton of other features that make this an attractive offering (multiple backup destinations, secure, unlimited storage, etc.). Finally, it is dirt cheap. I have all of the computers in my house automatically backing up to the cloud for just $6 a month. It's nice to see that a company understands that homes have networks, and doesn't lump them into an enterprise-grade price.

If you're not backing up to the cloud, I highly recommend giving CrashPlan a try. If they had a referral program, I'd probably be able to retire because I'd be pumping them up at every turn! :)

[I have not been contacted by, compensated by, or otherwise asked to post this. I'm just reporting my satisfaction with a service that I've been looking for since 2009.]

At work here, we use generated files with partial classes to get us through the tedium of creating mundane classes. It works well enough, but one of my biggest complaints about this is that if you then need to do a Find in Files, you get hundreds, or maybe thousands, of extra hits when searching for something that would be found inside those generated files.

Today I came across the free tool Ultra Find in the Extensions gallery. It does exactly what I want, namely, lets me focus on the search results that aren't in the generated files.

Thanks, Logan. Very useful!

While creating a view model for an MVC 3 application, I annotated a property with the DataType.EmailAddress attribute. My thinking was that it would validate whether or not the contents of the property was in a valid email format. The attribute does not perform validation, however. This StackOverflow article discusses some ways to add that functionality.

I heard about thenounproject.com on Twitter recently. It looks like a real nice project to provide simple icons. The downside (to me) was that they are stored as svg files. I want to be sure to easily support IE8 (see here), so I wanted to convert the files to png. There aren't a lot of free, accurate solutions out there, so I thought I'd share the best one I found.

The conversion is finally on. I've had a lot of praise for LightSpeed over the years. The guys writing it are wicked smart, and Ivan is a rockstar on the support forums. They've solved a lot of bugs for me while I've been a customer, but the time has come to move on.

I've become quite proficient with LINQ, and use it all over the place in my code. Having to drop down and execute loops and run suboptimal queries because I have to execute an intermediate ToList() just to get around projection and grouping errors has taken its toll on me.

I truly wish the guys at Mindscape continued success, but the time has come to move on to the company that provides a MSSQL LINQ provider that is completely fleshed out.

I've been ussing CC.NET for probably the last 5 years with good success. At work, we recently migrated to TFS 2010 (installation and configuration are brutal, but it's sort of nice when it all works). I figured I'd take this time to look around and see what I've been missing on the continuous integration scene for my personal projects. The 2 leading contenders were TeamCity and Bamboo. I went with TeamCity since I use ReSharper, and think the JetBrains guys are pretty top-notch.

Installation was drop-dead simple. Configuring was pretty straight-forward, but I had an assist from StackOverflow, which led me to this amazing article/series by Troy Hunt. After following Troy's instructions, and slightly adjusting for the obvious version differences, I had things up and running, with a completed build inside 15 minutes.

I also configured the Build Triggering step because I want the build to fire off each time I checkin. I've got a few things to take care of (notifications of broken builds, code coverage, etc.), but it looks like this is a much easier application to configure than CC.NET.