Dev Talk Monday is the series that brings you awesome dev talks every Monday

Good day cybernauts! It’s time for a filler! :)

Everyday I become more amazed at the quantity of awesome resources there are free and available on the Internets. They are just waiting there to be found, enjoyed, and to help us improve our craft. This time I have started watching some of the talks from this years’ NDC Conference and I wanted to recommend a couple of them (for starters xD).

First we have a vision, a sneak-peak of sorts into the future of web development with Steve Sanderson developer at Microsoft and author of knockout.js. The talk is titled Web Development in 2020 and is a hilarious, inspired and exciting talk about a lot of cool stuff happening in the web development arena:

With just 5 years to go until The Future™ officially starts in 2020, it’s time to pull on your lycra-and-tinfoil onesie, pick out the colour of your hovercar, and consider the technologies you’ll use for your upcoming web projects.

Thanks to a temporal wormhole triggered by a freak SharePoint misconfiguration, I can exclusively reveal the architecture of a web app designed several years in the future. Some of it is predictable ES6/7 stuff - web components, shadow DOM, etc. - but then it gets into metaprogramming, cross-compilation from native code, advanced parallelism techniques, layout without CSS, and more.

In this demo-centric session I’ll show you each of these likely upcoming web technologies. Most of them are impossible (or at least downright irresponsible) to use in production web apps today, but seeing them in action will give you a sense of the possibilities that may soon open up.

Next, something more practical and nearer in the future, a talk about the Aurelia framework and how the next generation web apps will look like with Rob Eisenberg its creator. I love this framework for its minimalism, convention over configuration and the fact that it mixes so well will web standards. It feels just like writing vanilla JavaScript!

And to wrap it up we have a new series of videos explaining the basics of functional programming using JavaScript as a medium. They are super fun and hilarious to watch, informative and super clear, Mattias may just be the next YouTube superstar. xD

And that was it for today. Have a great week!

Last week, which strangely feels like a looong time ago maybe ‘cause of the time-distorsion-field of my vacations who knows, I passed the 70-487 certification exam on Azure and Web Services and got the MCSD Web Applications title! Wiiii! Awesome!

That was one of my job/career goals for the year so I’m beyond happy, and I also got to learn A TON along the way, so I’m double-beyond-happy xD.

I wrote another exam study guide with notes and links that may help you if you are considering taking the exam yourself. Here you have all study guides I’ve written thus far:

• Microsoft Certification 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Study Guide
• Microsoft Certification 70-486: Developing ASP.NET MVC Applications Study Guide
• Microsoft Certification 70-487: Azure and Web Services Study Guide

Up next. Write a friggin’ book! Wish me luck.

Barbaric Tip of the Week is a weekly series whose main purpose is to share tiny bits of knowledge that I find specially useful and interesting.

Web Essentials is an awesome Visual Studio Plugin that comes with a ton of goodies to help web developers build great websites. One of these goodies is a port of ZenCoding(now known as Emmet), a plugin in itself that helps you to write HTML and CSS in a super intuitive and fast way.

With Zen Coding you can use CSS selectors to generate a whole tree of html elements from a single line of code. For instance, let’s say that you want to create a list of items. You can type this snippet within Visual Studio:

ol>li*5

Press TAB and see how it expands into a complete HTML list:

<ol>
    <li></li>    
    <li></li>    
    <li></li>    
    <li></li>    
    <li></li>    
</ol>

And in that same spirit you can use any CSS selector and get the results that you would expect based on CSS selector semantics. For instance:

section.spell-book>article.spell*5>header>h1>a[name="spell-name-$"]{spell-name-$}

Would become:

<section class="spell-book">
    <article class="spell">
        <header>
            <h1><a href="" name="spell-name-1">spell-name-1</a></h1>
        </header>
    </article>
    <article class="spell">
        <header>
            <h1><a href="" name="spell-name-2">spell-name-2</a></h1>
        </header>
    </article>
    <article class="spell">
        <header>
            <h1><a href="" name="spell-name-3">spell-name-3</a></h1>
        </header>
    </article>
    <article class="spell">
        <header>
            <h1><a href="" name="spell-name-4">spell-name-4</a></h1>
        </header>
    </article>
    <article class="spell">
        <header>
            <h1><a href="" name="spell-name-5">spell-name-5</a></h1>
        </header>
    </article>
</section>

And you can even use custom elements if you are working with Web components, Angular, Aurelia or any other modern web framework:

magic-spell-book>magic-spell>header>h1>a[name="spell-name-$"]{spell-name-$}

Would become:

<magic-spell-book>
    <magic-spell>
        <header>
            <h1><a href="" name="spell-name-1">spell-name-1</a></h1>
        </header>
    </magic-spell>
</magic-spell-book>

Using ZenCoding (Emmet) With CSS

ZenCoding gives you a lot of help even when you are writing CSS in the form of style abbreviations. If you want to add some margins to a given class, you can use the following abbreviation:

m20-10

click on TAB and voilà:

margin: 20px 10px;

And there’s a ton more of CSS stuff ZenCoding can help you with:

// specify units
m50p
margin: 50%;
fz2e
font-size: 2em
// or colors
c#4
color: #444;
// and you have abbreviations for 
// pretty much every CSS property

And It Comes With a LoremIpsum Generator

How many times have you gone off to the web to find a lorem ipsum generator to add some fake content to your website as you go prototyping? Well, do that no more! ZenCoding also gives you a Lorem Ipsum generator that integrates perfectly with its HTML generation workflow. Just type:

article>p*2>lorem

And you’ll get all the lorem you need:

<article>
    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. Quaerat laboriosam laudantium repellendus nihil quos ipsum vero eligendi dignissimos consequuntur praesentium quasi ullam aut omnis assumenda provident ratione repudiandae debitis soluta.</p>
    <p>Dolore eveniet tenetur eius consequatur reiciendis nisi et magnam praesentium in voluptatum. Incidunt vitae ipsam veniam tenetur corrupti itaque officiis temporibus perspiciatis aperiam ex et alias blanditiis minus harum fugiat.</p>
</article>

Start Learning ZenCoding (Emmet) With The CheatSheet

A very nice way to get started learning the different features available and CSS abbreviations that come with Emmet is to take a look at its Cheatsheet.

And it is Also Available For Other Editors!

Emmet is available, not only in Visual Studio with Web Essentials, but also in other editors that you know and love like Sublime, Atom, Brackets, TextMate, WebStorm, etc and even in online quick prototyping tools like jsFiddle, jsBin or codePen.

So go take a look at it if you haven’t already! Have a nice day!

P.S. Note that although I have used ZenCoding and Emmet almost interchangeably during the article, some features in Emmet are not available in ZenCoding. Particularly CSS abbreviations are not yet implemented in Web Essentials’ port of ZenCoding.