Earlier this week, I attended CapArea (Capital Area .NET User’s Group) in northern Virginia. The topic was “Node for .NET Developers”, presented by Kevin Griffin.
Last week, I had just attended a user group meeting for DCDNUG, hosted by G. Andrew Duthie, a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft. The topic was “Developing Games for the Windows Store with HTML5 and JavaScript” and was a great introduction to creating games for Microsoft’s new platform using familiar web technologies.
I downloaded Andrew’s Community Megaphone app for Windows 8 after the meeting, and learned about the interactive event, Game Development for Beginners, at Microsoft’s Reston VA office. This is one of many free Game Dev events from Microsoft listed in the app.
Introduction
JavaScript is almost as old as the first graphical browsers, but it has been swimming in a sea of spaghetti code since its inception. With the introduction of many JavaScript frameworks over the years, there has been a lot of improvement in making it a robust programming language. One such framework is Knockout.js, which uses the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern to bind HTML templates to a JavaScript view model.
I recently took and passed the Microsoft exam MCSD 70-480 “Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3”.
However, this exam is relatively new as of early 2013, and the official book wasn’t out yet when I first published this blog post. It is now available for purchase, as of Spring 2013.
To prepare for the exam, you may refer to the following online resources:
