Coding

Recently Microsoft started offering a $100 per month credit to all MSDN subscribers for using their Azure cloud based services. A lot of developers here at ICF have MSDN subscriptions so I definitely recommend checking this out if you haven’t already done so. I never really considered using Azure for anything as I had assumed it was mostly used as a cloud based hosting service similar to Amazon. It wasn’t until I recently read a blog post by Scott Hanselman that I realized Azure could be used for much more than that. ...

Last week I attended my first Drupal ’learn sprint’. For anyone interested in contributing to the Drupal community, learn sprints are a great way to network with other professionals in the area while learning how you can contribute to Drupal. ...

The decision tree application is currently a work-in-progress. The main source files can be downloaded here: Source Files. The current demo is non-functional and only shows a subset of the application, which will be developed in the upcoming weeks: Demo Application (Work in progress) ...

The following are my responses to a series of simple PHP problems (attached in the Word File). I needed to review Doyle (2010) chapters 9 and 10 which cover form submission and session variables in order to complete these exercises. I also leaned on chapter 18 which goes into depth on regular expressions to assist with pattern recognition. ...

This week I rewrote one of the PHP tasks from earlier and created a new function to emulate the functionality of str_pad. The function I wrote accepts a text string parameter, length, a reverse parameter (for padding on left or right) and finally an optional symbol parameter to show where the padding is happening. In addition to this I have outlined what I am planning on developing for a Drupal module later in the semester. ...

PHP provides many different functions for manipulating strings. Some of the more common functions are provided here, however for a full listing of all the available string functions see http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.strings.php. ...

This week I have been focusing on the first few chapters of Doyle (2010), specifically on PHP language basics, decisions and loops and strings. ...

Conditional statements (or decisions) and loops make up a good portion of programming code in general. I am familiar with these concepts though other languages, however I have never programmed them in PHP. This week I have been reviewing the first 5 chapters of Beginning PHP 5.3, which has been giving me a good solid introduction to PHP. ...

Variables in PHP are similar to define and use as with other programming languages. PHP uses loose typed variables, in other words they do not have to be defined specifically as a datatype upon initialization and can be changed to other data types using expressions. ...

This week I have been reading the first five chapters of Beginning PHP 5.3, Doyle (2010). Chapter 1 gave a good overview of PHP and it’s advantages. It drew comparisons to other programming languages, which I found interesting coming from a ColdFusion background. ...