It’s probably an understatement to say that ASP.NET Web API has sparked a bit of debate about RESTful design lately.

Web API’s new features like content negotiation, flexible media formatters, and improved JSON formatter are great, but they’ve been presented as features that are tied to the REST paradigm. That may seem troubling if you’re more accustomed to .NET’s RPC endpoints like ASMX, WCF, and even the way ASP.NET MVC controller actions are often used as a makeshift API.

A couple months after the new incarnation of Web API was announced, I’m still seeing a lot of confusion and unhappiness about Web API’s apparent push toward REST. However, what almost everyone has overlooked so far is that Web API supports RPC just as well as REST.

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There’s been plenty of cynical talk going around about today’s news that Facebook is acquiring Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. One of the most salient points is the simple arithmetic on how much Facebook is paying for each of Instagram’s roughly 30 million users. With Facebook paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $33 per Instagram user, that seems fairly pricey compared to Facebook’s own valuation of roughly $120 per user.

What’s missing from that math is that Facebook users spend a huge amount of their time sharing and viewing photos. According to recent Comscore data, Facebook users are spending 17% of their time viewing photos on Facebook. Photos are incredibly important to Facebook.

Thinking of how I use Facebook and how I’ve seen others use it, I’d even make a case for the photos being a crucial part of drawing users into the remaining 83%.

Almost overnight, Instagram’s social network of photo enthusiasts gave it a solid beachhead into some 17% of Facebook’s social stronghold. Perhaps maybe even more importantly, Instagram is entirely focused on mobile (where Facebook sees its future). Maybe Instagram had no intention of ever competing head-to-head with Facebook, but I believe Instagram actually posed a greater potential threat than Google+ has yet.

Though it’s hard to fathom a $1 billion valuation for such a simple app and service, maybe that’s a reasonable price to quash potential competition to the unimaginable windfall that is Facebook. Facebook isn’t buying new users, but paying a premium to retain the union of Facebook and Instagram’s shared users and redirecting this aspect of their engagement back toward Facebook.

It’s been a few months since I began reviewing ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 based on day-to-day use, and it’s time to wrap the process up with a third and final post. The original plan for this series of reviews was that I’d write three posts about the Zenbook, finishing with one that summarized my experience using it regularly for a few months.

Unfortunately, the trouble I had with its keyboard sabotaged that plan. If you haven’t been following along, a month with the Zenbook’s keyboard was all I could endure. However, almost every other aspect of the UX31 put it solidly in the running as a successor to my MacBook Air.

Rather than ending on that sour note about the keyboard, this last post in the series will cover a few things that the Zenbook did well. So well, I’ll be looking for these features in whichever Ultrabook™ ultimately does replace my MacBook Air.

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The IE team published an in-depth post over the weekend, raising a few concerns about StatCounter’s methodology (or lack thereof) for reporting browser market share. Their points were interesting to consider, but one of them stood out to me:

You’ll notice some pretty big differences in the weighting of StatCounter versus Net Applications. First and foremost, the most populous country in the world, China, doesn’t make the top 20 for StatCounter, when in fact it represents the world’s largest internet population.

[...]

To further explore this problem, we re-ran the StatCounter numbers and weighted their publicly reported individual country browser share numbers by the CIA internet population data. This calculation would then represent a true country or geo-weighted view of worldwide browser data based on the actual world’s internet population.

It’s true that we should be wary of methodology issues that can creep into data extracted from analytics services that weren’t designed with aggregate statistics in mind. StatCounter’s data is often accepted at face value, without any detailed scrutiny. However, I believe this geo-weighting approach they’ve explored may be as flawed as the raw, unadjusted data itself.

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There’s been some confusing back and forth lately about ASP.NET Web API and JSON. During the time between the last WCF Web API preview and the current ASP.NET Web API beta, it’s clear that effort has gone into smoothing out some of DataContractJsonSerializer’s (DCJS) quirks. However, while things like DateTime and Enum deserialization have been improved, issues have still persisted with Anonymous Types, Dictionaries, and DateTime serialization.

Unfortunately, the underlying cause of those remaining issues was too fundamental to simply spackle over. One of the most frustrating aspects of DCJS is that it’s rooted in WCF’s mindset that all things can be expressed as XML and then translated to other formats. In that world, data like Anonymous Types and simple collections of key/value pairs are uninteresting oddities. So, as long as ASP.NET Web API is saddled with DCJS, it’s at a disadvantage in scenarios requiring more flexible JSON serialization.

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Note: If you haven’t read my initial impressions of the Zenbook, you might want to head over and read that first: The ASUS Zenbook UX31: Initial impressions

I’ve been using my ASUS Zenbook for just over a month at this point, and it’s time for a second review now that I’ve used it for a while on a day-to-day basis. I’ve heard from many of you about being eager to read the next installment in this process, so I’m glad to know that you’re finding this experiment useful too.

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There’s been a bit of controversy lately concerning the rising dominance of WebKit-based browsers (e.g. Chrome, Safari, and Mobile Safari) and the potential that we’re repeating past mistakes:

Not so long ago, IE6 was the over-dominant browser on the Web. Technically, the Web was full of works-only-in-IE6 web sites and the other browsers, the users were crying. IE6 is dead, this time is gone, and all browsers vendors including Microsoft itself rejoice. Gone? Not entirely… IE6 is gone, the problem is back.

However, I believe there’s one gigantic difference between IE6 then and WebKit now that’s being overlooked.

Microsoft put the brakes on Internet Explorer development after IE6 because they realized that they were helping build the runtime for their own competition. If Internet Explorer releases had continued at the same pace, most everyone would probably be using IE15 today and IE6 would be as memorable as Chrome 4 or Firefox 7.

Conversely, Google has a vested interest in Chrome’s ongoing success (and WebKit’s success by extension). Instead of threatening Google’s primary revenue stream, WebKit and Chrome serve to enhance Google’s golden goose. So, unlike the past situation with Microsoft, Netscape, and IE6, Google has no motivation whatsoever to shutter active development on Chrome and WebKit if it overtakes Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Does that make vendor prefixes and targeting experimental features a great idea? Maybe not. Frankly, I’m not qualified to speak intelligently about cutting edge CSS features.

What I do know is that just because the current climate seems similar to the one ten years ago, that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to assume history is repeating.

One of the hardest parts of being privy to NDA information is keeping my mouth shut about new developments that I wish I could share with you immediately, often for months at a time.

Recent developments around ASP.NET Web API (formerly WCF Web API) are a perfect example of that conundrum. As development on WCF Web API seemingly stagnated on CodePlex, Microsoft had actually rolled the project into ASP.NET itself. The project was in no danger whatsoever, but (frustratingly) I wasn’t able to tell you that.

So, it’s a relief that today’s today’s ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta release has made that news public:

Top Features

• ASP.NET Web API
• Refreshed and modernized default project templates
• New mobile project template
• Many new features to support mobile apps
• Recipes to customize code generation
• Enhanced support for asynchronous methods

Though Web API isn’t necessarily a gigantic step forward from using MVC’s controllers as a makeshift API for simple scenarios, it’s great that ASP.NET now has common mechanism for creating these endpoints that works the same way on both WebForms and MVC.

I’ve long held out against pressure to move from ASMX to WCF in WebForms projects, because accepting WCF’s complexity primarily only rewarded me with less flexible JSON serialization. By contrast, I’ve begun converting some of my projects from ASMX to Web API, and have been pleased with how easily Web API replaces ASMX.

I believe Microsoft has finally found a good balance between ASMX’s simplicity and WCF’s power with Web API.

Since it was built with jQuery in mind from the very start, I’m finding that Web API is perfect for the sort of work that I usually write about here. It even automatically responses to requests from jQuery with JSON, even if you use simple URL encoded parameters with the request, so adding an endpoint for AJAX interaction in either WebForms or MVC is a breeze now.

I’ll be writing more about actually using Web API here in the future, but I wanted to get this post published right away to help spread the news that Web API isn’t dead.

To learn more about what exactly Web API is and does, have a look at its section in the release notes. To get up and running quickly with some example code, take a look at the new Web API material on the ASP.NET site.

I took part in The Code Project’s A Coder Interview series recently, and the result was published there yesterday. Terrence happened to send the questions at a rare moment when I wasn’t running in five directions at once, which led to me accidentally writing quite a bit.

Part of it touches on something important to me that I plan to write more about eventually:

What advice would you offer to an up-and-coming programmer?

Write about programming. Start a blog, answer questions on The Code Project or Stack Overflow, or whatever else suits you, but find some way to write about programming.

I can’t count how many times I began writing about something I thought I knew thoroughly, only to find that I had to fill in several important gaps in my knowledge to write about it competently. Just as important, you have to learn topics more comprehensively to distill and teach them in simple terms. The combination of writing about programming and making that writing as clear and simple as you can is a powerful exercise.

[…]

The interview also exposes my shameful stance on tabs vs. spaces, but you’ll have to go there to read that part…

Click here to read the full interview at The Code Project

For over a year now, I’ve been using a 13” MacBook Air as my only laptop. Though it’s a bit underpowered and I prefer Windows to OS X, I was ultimately unable to resist Apple’s build quality compared to the Dell I had used previously.

However, I never fully resigned myself to accepting a dichotomy between quality construction and operating system. Thankfully, the recent proliferation of Windows-based Ultrabook™ machines seems to be rapidly bridging that divide.

Given my already-growing desire to find an alternative, when I was contacted about reviewing the ASUS’ Zenbook UX31 Ultrabook™, I decided to give it a go. I know I’m not alone in having been frustrated with a choice between machines that run Windows well and quality hardware, so I hope that you’ll find my experience of trying to move back from the MacBook hardware useful.

Disclaimer: Up front, I want you to know that I’m receiving a complementary UX31 in return for evaluating it and writing a few posts about that experience. I’ll give you my honest assessment of it and only recommend it if it meets my own standards, but I also think it’s important to be transparent and not potentially abuse your trust.

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