Custom Russian Phonetic Keyboard Layout for Mac OSX

Most of my developer life I worked on Windows, and other operation system were strange for me.
But since about year ago I am working on projects for mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and naturally became a Mac OSX user. To make my life with OSX to be the same comfortable as with Windows, I needed to find several tools and features, which replace my "lovely" windows analogs.
One of them is custom keyboard layout.

I am a Russian speaker living in Israel where I use to use English-Hebrew keyboard. For typing in Russian I use Russian phonetic keyboard layout available from this site: http://winrus.com/kbd_e.htm.

Mac OSX has built-in Russian phonetic keyboard, but the layout is slightly different. Sounds like there is not a big deal to learn new layout, but if I switch between Windows and Mac, it become annoying to adjust my mind for layout differences.

Fortunately, there is a way to customise keyboard layout on Mac OSX using "Ukelele" software.

Using Ukelele I took built-in Russian phonetic keyboard layout and changed several keys to make it the same as on windows.

Saved "Russian - phonetic - ZH.keylayout" and "Russian - phonetic - ZH.icns" files into "/Library/Keyboard Layouts", and was able to select it from "System Preferences > Keyboard >  Input Sources"

Vualah! My OSX word is friendly for me!

I am happy to share it with you, please download my custom Russian keyboard layout from here: http://1drv.ms/1mH5NTf

Using Compass framework with ASP.NET MVC application.

In my previous post I described how to start working with SASS using Mindscape Web Workbench.

In this post I am taking next step - start working with Compass - CSS Authoring Framework.

Immediately after installing Web Workbench, you can create/edit SCSS file, which are compiled into CSS. By default, Web Workbench compile SCSS files with SASS compiler.  But there is a trick:

Tools: SlowCheetah - XML Transforms

If you have different Debug/Release configurations and want to switch them automatically when you run application - this tool is "must to have" for you.

SlowCheetah - XML Transforms
"This package enables you to transform your app.config or any other XML file based on the build configuration. It also adds additional tooling to help you create XML transforms.. Written by: Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi, Chuck England and Bill Hiebert"

Just used it with my application, it works like a charm, no more lines of code in build script changing configuration for production environment. 

Highly recommended!

Add power of SASS to ASP.NET application

I always wanted to find a way to develop CSS in a way I write C# or JavaScript. The main problem in CSS as a language for me were complexity of refactoring and code reuse.

There were projects such SASS and LESS, but there was no way to adopt them into .NET/Visual Studio environment easily.

About month ago I met amazing product - Mindscape Web Workbench . It is a Visual Studio plug in, allows you to write SASS, LESS and Coffee Script with Visual Studio and therefore use power of those technologies in ASP.NET project.

TypeScript lambda expression

In my opinion, TypeScript is the best solution for MS/.NET oriented development.

At first - it is very similar to C#, that makes .NET developer's life easy.

At second - TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, and you can mix "pure" JavaScript code with "typed" TypeScript. It is very important in case you have a lot of JavaScript in your project and want to take advantage of modern web technologies. I have an example - my IZWebFileManager project

At third (but not less important) - it has Lambda expression

I am using JQuery AJAX, and used to write such code:

It is simple closure, that I use to keep reference to the instance that I work with from ajax callback.
This pattern became routine and very annoying.

But TypeScript bring the solution:

It is much simple, no need to care of what 'this' is anymore. It just does all this annoying routine behind the scene. There is compiled JavaScript output:

It worth to move to TypeScript just because it is a great feature

Junk Email - free source of Unicode characters

When you test Unicode support of an application, you likely use text snippets of foreign language.

Recently I found a free source of such texts - it is Junk Email. There you can find tons of text in Chinesе, Turkish, Russian and more. :)

IZWebFileManager got better!

Today I released a new build of IZWebFileManager - v2.8.0.

This is a new minor release, but it includes a major changes.

First of all, I dropped IE7 support. Previous version 2.7.2 works in IE7, and you may stick with it if you really need IE7 support.

A new "supper" feature has been added  - Select Folder dialog. When you copy or move selected item, then  Select Folder dialog is open to allow you to pick up a destination.

In additional, there are many new properties were added to support look and feel customization:

• SelectedItemBackColor
• SelectedItemForeColor 
• SelectedItemBorderColor 
• SelectFolderTreeStyle
• DetailsColumnHeaderStyle 
• DetailsSortedColumnStyle 
• DynamicMenuStyle 
• TextBoxStyle 

Demo project contains samples of using of them.

You can download this new build from project's page.