Mark Embling

Spurred on by the excitement of the HTML5 canvas hack night, I decided to put together something of my own using canvas and generally have a good play around with it all, and throw in a few extra new-and-shiny goodies such as audio.

In December I posted about MongoDB and using it within .NET applications. I had always intended to post one (or more) follow-up posts but various things conspired against me causing it never to happen. Well, now that time is over and I thought it was about time I explored another MongoDB .NET driver.

I've noticed with interest the 'NoSQL' movement which seems to have arrived recently and have on the whole ignored it. I generally find myself getting on well with relational databases and based on that fact (and the fact they are so commonly used), I have not looked into any of the alternatives. However, I have recently read various articles talking in particularly about CouchDB and MongoDB and after reading a little bit about both, I decided to give MongoDB a closer look.

Too often in my web development past I have found myself wading through huge clumsy CSS files of several hundred lines or more, searching for that place where a particular class is defined or to try and identify what it is that is overriding something else. It can be quite a nightmare. However I recently came accross .Less (pronounced "dot-less"), a port of the great Ruby Less library for .NET. This is a brilliantly simple-to-use solution to an often-painful situation.