I just spent like six hours trying to figure this out, so profit from my experience.

I have some custom code wiring up jQuery Validation in a form and for some reason, the jQuery “html” method was causing a “HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: DOM Exception 3” whenever validation errors were being displayed. After banging my head against it for a while and getting some help from a co-worker, we found it came down to the $.each iterator.

I was compiling up a list of error messages and using the $.each to add them to settings for a jQuery validator. It looked something like this:

var parsed = {
  required: "A is required",
  notEqual: "A must not equal B"
};
$.each(parsed, function(rulename){
  options.messages[prefix + rulename] = this;
});

As you can see, I wasn’t doing a straight extension - I needed to add a prefix to the hash key, so I iterated through. The gotcha is that this in the iterator loop isn’t actually literally the same as the value of the item.

More explicitly:

var parsed = {
  required: "A is required",
  notEqual: "A must not equal B"
};
// typeof parsed.required === "string"

$.each(parsed, function(rulename){
  // typeof this === "object"
  options.messages[prefix + rulename] = this;
});

That type conversion was what was causing the problem. Way down the line, after wiring everything up to jQuery Validation, the validator would try to do something roughly like this:

$("<span />").html(message)

At the time of execution, message wasn’t a string, it was an object, so the DOM threw a tantrum and resulted in “HIERARCHY_REQUEST_ERR: DOM Exception 3”.

The answer is to not use this in the iterator. Instead, provide the second parameter to the iterator function that brings along with it the original item value:

var parsed = {
  required: "A is required",
  notEqual: "A must not equal B"
};
$.each(parsed, function(rulename, message){
  options.messages[prefix + rulename] = message;
});

That way the string value isn’t boxed into an object and you won’t lose the type information.

I recently upgraded my phone to a Samsung Galaxy SIII. So far, seriously, this thing is awesome. It’s fast, I love Android 4.0, the screen is super clear, the camera is nice… serious win over my older Droid X.

One of the things Samsung seems to be pushing is the NFC (near field communication) abilities of the phone. They have these little NFC tags you can buy called “TecTiles” that you can use to play with NFC. They have an Android app you can use to program the tags or use them to execute programs from tags read by your phone.

I figured I’d try out some of these TecTiles and see what it’s all about.

TecTiles are small, about an inch square, and are stickers. Here’s one still on the backing paper:

They run roughly $3 each - you get them in a pack of 5 for about $15, though sometimes you can find them a little cheaper.

To program them, you first open the TecTiles app.

From there, you can pick what you want the TecTile to do. You can choose from “Settings & Apps” (have it change phone settings or launch an app); “Phone & Text” (have the phone make a call, send a text, or add a contact); “Location & Web” (do a Facebook or Foursquare check-in or visit a web site); or “Social” (update Twitter or Facebook status, connect on LinkedIn).

For this walkthrough, I’ll choose “Settings & Apps.” Once you do, you get asked what sort of tag you want to make.

I chose “Change Phone Settings.” Then you get to choose which settings you want to change.

You can select more than one setting at a time, but for now I just chose to set my phone in Silent mode. The next screen gives you some options about what exactly you want it to do.

In this case, I want the tag to set my phone into Silent mode. This is something I might put on my desk at work so when I get in I can scan the tile and have it in “work mode.” Once it’s all set, you’re ready to program the TecTile.

You just hold the phone over the little TecTile sticker, magic happens, and it’s programmed. You’ll notice there are options to “lock” the TecTile so you can’t re-program it. If, for example, you put your business contact info on the TecTile and stuck that on the front register at your store, you’d lock the tile so no pranksters overwrite it. There’s also an “allow multiple writes” option to allow you to re-use the program across multiple TecTiles. (I was actually hoping this option would allow me to make more complex programs by writing multiple “tasks” to the same TecTile, but, alas, no.)

To use the TecTile, you just sit your phone next to it/on it. Depending on what the TecTile is programmed to do, sometimes it brings up some info directly, but generally it seems to do most actions through the browser. For example, when you update Twitter status, it does it through the browser inteface, not the Twitter app. Here’s the weird bit - in the case here, where I’m setting my phone to silent mode, you still get an alert that the browser is launching:

But when I click “OK,” the browser doesn’t come up - instead the TecTile app takes over and notifies me my phone is going into Silent mode.

Then that screen disappears and I go on my merry way.

I liked that it was pretty simple to get working and seemed novel… but I have to admit I’m a little disappointed. The list of available actions right now is pretty small:

Settings & Apps

Change Phone Settings

• Alarm Time
• Alarm Switch
• Car Mode
• Night Mode
• Bluetooth
• WiFi
• Silent
• Ringer Volume
• Music Volume
• Automatic Brightness
• Brightness

Launch an App

Join a WiFi Network

Show a Message

Phone & Text

• Make a Call
• Send a Text Message
• Share a Contact
• Start a Google Talk Conversation

Location & Web

• Show an Address or Location
• Foursquare Check In
• Facebook Check In
• Open a Web Page

Social

• Update Facebook Status
• Facebook Like
• Tweet a Status
• Follow a Twitter User
• Connect on LinkedIn

I mean, that doesn’t look small, but the first thing I wanted to do was set my phone in Vibrate mode since I use that at work, not Silent. But… no luck. Then I thought it would be neat to do a Latitude check-in since I use Latitude, not Facebook or Foursquare. Nope.

The “Send a Text Message” action doesn’t work right now, which is the first one I actually tried (after not finding Vibrate mode or Latitude check-in) but it seems they’re having problems with that. The most recent update says it fixed some problem with sending messages, but it doesn’t look fixed to me. (You scan the tile and then… back to the home screen. Nothing.)

Another thing: You can’t do any complex actions. For example, if you wanted a tile at work that turns your phone to Silent and then checks in… nope. That’s two tiles, not one.

In the end, I don’t really feel ripped off or anything. I’m having fun messing around with them, and I know I’m pretty early to the party on this, so I have faith they’ll beef up the offering as time goes on. However, from a practical standpoint, it doesn’t do all the stuff I’d like it to.

On a final note, for a more “real world” type of scenario, check out NameBump. These guys make NFC-enabled business cards. Hand your card to a potential client, and they can scan it with their phone to get your contact info in their phone instantly. That’s pretty slick and seems to me a great use of NFC. You could do something similar with TecTiles if you wanted - just program the TecTile and stick it to your card. Or, if you’re at a trade show, stick it to your vendor badge and hold it out for people to scan. I may have to do this for the next conference I go to. Rather than exchange cards, “Here

• scan my badge.”

Sublime Text 2 is the first text editor that’s actually gotten me excited about text editors(!) for quite some time. It’s fast, clean, super extensible… I bought my license when it was still in beta and I’ve never looked back.

One of the things it was missing was support for MSBuild scripting - syntax highlighting, build execution, and so on. I do a lot of MSBuild work, I wanted to try my hand at Sublime Text 2 extensions, plus I wanted to try out GitHub, so I took the opportunity to roll all of those things into One Giant Project:

SublimeMSBuild - a Sublime Text 2 package that adds support for MSBuild.

Here’s a list of the features it includes:

• MSBuild file extension handling:
  • .proj
  • .targets
  • .msbuild
  • .csproj
  • .vbproj
• Build system: Execute the currently loaded MSBuild script and capture the results in the output pane.
• Syntax highlighting:
  • MSBuild keywords and flow-control elements
  • Standard MSBuild tasks
  • C#/VB special project item elements
  • Well-known item metadata
  • Reserved properties
  • Variables
  • Conditional operators
  • Framework support functions
  • Comment blocks
• Snippets:
  • New MSBuild Script
  • Comment blocks [trigger = c + tab]
  • Self-closing/simple tags [trigger = > + tab]
  • Content/end-tag tags [trigger = < + tab]
• Autocompletion:
  • Standard/default tasks (e.g., CallTarget, CombinePath, MakeDir)
  • Project file entities (e.g., Target, Choose, Import)
  • Common item definitions (e.g., Compile, Reference, EmbeddedResource)
  • Well-known item metadata references (e.g., %(Item.FullPath))
  • Reserved properties (e.g., $(MSBuildProjectDirectory))
  • MSBuild Community Tasks (if the MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets file is imported)
  • C#/VB special project item elements (e.g., Reference, Compile)
  • Supported framework method calls (e.g., $([System.DateTime]::Now))

Installation is simple. There are two options:

Use Package Control. Package Control is a free package manager for Sublime Text 2. You can select the MSBuild package right from the list of available packages.

Manual installation:

• Download the MSBuild.sublime-package from the GitHub site.
• Drop the package file into the “Installed Packages” folder in Sublime Text 2.

Plus, if you want to muck around with it, add features, or even just see how it works, you can hack on it yourself. There are some pointers in the readme.

I’m personally pretty pleased with how it turned out, particularly the autocomplete/IntelliSense support for the various MSBuild tasks. Try it out, I hope you like it as much as I do.

As far as what I learned along the way… The extensibility model on Sublime Text is pretty awesome and easy to work with. I’m not really a Python guy, but I was able to figure it out pretty easily. And GitHub for Windows is a total gateway drug, so props to Phil Haack and crew for delivering that bad boy.

If you don’t have Sublime Text 2, what are you waiting for?

Once you have it,download and install the MSBuild.sublime-package.

We have a large group of devs all working on a single web application. As part of that, we have different folks all working in different branches, making changes to configuration files.

Visual Studio does a nice job of letting you keep code formatted via plugins like CodeRush and PowerCommands (“format on save”). Config files? Not so much.

As you can imagine, this creates no end of churn in merge conflicts as things switch from tabs to spaces and back, NuGet mucks around with dependency redirects, and entries get added and removed.

To address some of this, I decided to add some automatic config file formatting to our build so when you run the build, things automatically get cleaned up. Here’s how you can do this, too.

First, you’ll need a copy of HTML Tidy. HTML Tidy actually does work on config file XML as well as HTML as long as you specify that it’s not processing HTML. I grabbed this Windows executable since the main installer site seems to be gone.

Next, get the MSBuild Community Tasks in your build. There’s a nice FileUpdate task that will help during formatting and you’ll need it.

Finally, add the MSBuild script to your build. I have mine set up as a separate target that gets called just before compiling things.

<Target Name="FormatConfig">
  <ItemGroup>
    <ConfigFiles
      Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\**\*.config"
      Exclude="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\**\packages.config;$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\**\NuGet.config;$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\**\repositories.config" />
  </ItemGroup>
  <Exec
    Command="tidy.exe --input-xml yes --output-xml yes --preserve-entities yes --indent yes --indent-spaces 4 --input-encoding utf8 --indent-attributes yes --wrap 0 &quot;%(ConfigFiles.FullPath)&quot; > &quot;%(ConfigFiles.FullPath).formatted&quot;"
    WorkingDirectory="path\to\tidy\folder" />
  <FileUpdate
    Files="%(ConfigFiles.FullPath).formatted"
    Regex="&lt;add\s+(key|name)=&quot;([<sup>&quot;]*)&quot;\s+value=&quot;([</sup>&quot;]*)&quot;\s+/&gt;"
    ReplacementText="&lt;add $1=&quot;$2&quot; value=&quot;$3&quot; /&gt;" />
  <Copy
    DestinationFiles="%(ConfigFiles.FullPath)"
    SourceFiles="%(ConfigFiles.FullPath).formatted" />
  <Delete Files="%(ConfigFiles.FullPath).formatted" />
</Target>

This block of script…

• Locates all of the config files to format. I’m formatting every config file except the ones associated with NuGet because I don’t manually tweak those. If you have other config files to format, include those in the ConfigFiles item.
• Executes tidy.exe against the config files. The options here indicate that I’m processing XML, I want it nicely indented with four spaces, and I want attributes nicely wrapped and indented. You can modify the settings yourself if this isn’t to your taste. Formatted file output gets created as a new file with the original filename suffixed by “formatted”, like “Web.config.formatted” so if anything goes wrong, it didn’t make changes to the actual item.
• FileUpdate cleans up simple name/value pairs. The downside to wrapping attributes is that simple name/value pairs get broken across lines. This makes things like appSettings harder to read, not easier. This little regex action running after tidy puts them back on one line.
• Replaces the original files with the nicely formatted versions. Simple copy/overwrite and delete of the temp file.

All in all, it’s pretty simple to get working and the end result is nice. Now as long as you can maintain a consistent element order in your config files, you’ll not get a merge conflict due to file formatting.

I love context menu “command prompt here” shortcuts. Every time a new VS version comes out, or a different prompt is available that I need, I create a new one.

In the past, I’ve tried to maintain a whole roundup of current versions, but that’s been tough. Different operating systems come out, I need to tweak this or that to make things work, and I end up having to edit and re-package the whole bundle. It’s also a pain for people wanting the installers – you want some, but not all; the tool isn’t quite what you want but you’re not sure what to tweak; and so on.

Today all of that stops.

Rather than maintain separate little .INF files for every command prompt type, I’ve created aCommand Prompt Here Generator. Using a handy little wizard interface, you can select from a list of command prompts that I know about. After that, you can optionally tweak the values. Want a different path? Fix it. Want the display text tweaked? Make it so. At the end, you can download a fully customized, generated installer for the prompt of your dreams.

Try it out, let me know what you think. If you want a new prompt added, you’ll need to let me know the info on the prompt (look at the “customize” screen in the wizard – that’s the info I need to know). Find a bug, drop me a line.

Visit the Command Prompt Here Generator