When using custom attributes in .Net, one of the most common tasks is to query a member for any custom attributes that are applied. The MemberInfo class has a GetCustomAttributes method for just this purpose.

I had a little trouble with my first use of a UIPageControl. I added it to my view in a XIB file and set the “Tint Color” and “Current Page” properties to dark colors. Everything looked great in the XIB but when I ran the app, the pager wasn’t there.

I recently had the need to use a UIGestureRecognizer for the first time in one of my iOS apps. Specifically, I was interested in recognizing swipe gestures in one of my views so UISwipeGestureRecognizer was the obvious choice.

I decided to give Windows Phone 8 development a shot, enticed by their “$8 for 8 days” deal on developer program membership (it’s normally $99/year). My idea is to try writing Easy Score Keeper for Windows Phone 8 since I just released it on iOS. Since I’ve been a Microsoft developer for 12 years and a .Net developer for about 9 I’m not worried about coding in C#.

But it turns out that getting started with development is harder than I expected. First off, I’m using almost entirely Macs now (even my wife’s main computer is a MacBook Pro). I thought I’d just use a Parallels VM (like I do in my day-to-day work). Unfortunately, the Windows Phone 8 emulator is actually a Hyper-V virtual machine so that adds some constraints to a development setup:

Rails’ asset pipeline is a great way to manage your javascript and CSS in a Rails app. By default it handles pre-processing your files (converting CoffeeScript to javascript and SASS to CSS), concatentating your files into a single file, and generating filenames including hashes of the content. This reduces the number of HTTP requests necessary to download your files and makes it easy to use HTTP caching on your assets.