Blog

Hey there! 

It has been a couple of months since my inaugural entry to this blog and since then I have accomplished a couple of things.  I've approached Web APIs and MVC in asp.net, which I was able to use to program a wordsearch generator and I've most recently I was tasked with creating a web service to turn an icon webfont into a somewhat customisable package of png images.

The Search for Words

The wordsearch was admittedly more difficult than I had initially suspected it to be, I learnt a lot about how MVC works in .NET through it's development however and found it to be an enjoyable experience. I approached it by detailing the logic with pen and paper, logic for which had to meet specific requirements. "Words need a minimum length", "Words can only intersect one other word." and "Words should be reversible, a percentage of which is defined by the user.".

I got most of the logic working with my initial attempt, but was unhappy with the presentation of it and the lack of flexibility. I was using the razor syntax to write the wordsearch to the page in a table, and using CSS3 psuedo-elements to draw the solution. This method wasn't printable and couldn't be easily configured into an actual game. Behind the scenes a lot of the code was basic, immutable and bulky so I revised it by attempting a more object oriented approach by handling state changes of objects through the controller allowing the controller to handle just the logic. I will admit this level of detail was likely unnecessary and potentially overkill, however it taught me a lot about how a more complex C# application could be written.

For the presentation of this view I opted to use the HTML5 canvas element and javascript populated by the razer syntax in the view so that I could create a more dynamic and reliable representation of the wordsearch on the page.

Font Imager? Icon Packager? Webfont Icon Generator?

You can read more about this here 

Overall...

I'm happy with the progress I've been making. I'm looking forward to becoming a certified developer at some point, headway on which I am planning to make as soon as possible and I'm hoping my future tasks will provide just as many opportunities to discover something new like Attribute Routing for Web APIs or HTTP headers as a solution to a problem.

Thanks for reading,

- Kerri