ASP.NET Resources

May 2005

How Do Color Blind People Perceive Color?

When we talk about building accessible web applications, we don’t imply that everything should be converted to text-only pages. Color and imagery are necessary and fine as long as we understand how color blind people—who constitute a wide audience on the web—perceive color.

5/23/2005 |

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GetXml() Output Looking Better Already

Remember we talked about DataSet.GetXml() and its ugly formatting when dumped in the Immediate Window within Visual Studio.NET 2003 and 2005? My coworker, Ronnie, figured that Debug.Write ([DataSet].GetXml()), added to your code, prints it quite nicely in the output window.

5/22/2005 |

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Netscape Is Dead! Long Live Netscape!

Now that Netscape 8 has finally hit the street, we can say with certainty: Netscape, as we knew it, is finally dead.

5/19/2005 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

Heil IBM!

Back in 2004 IBM announced they would move the company to Linux desktops by the end of 2005 (via InfoWorld). What turned out to be mission impossible throughout 2004 was that most of IBM’s internal web applications had been written "Internet Explorer only" style.

5/18/2005 |

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Free Book Giveaway Recap

Let’s see what we know about Microsoft and Corbis. There’s no definitive source, so I had to look around.

5/18/2005 |

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Free Book Giveaway Question

The question, I believe, is fairly simple: what do Microsoft and Corbis have in common? (See rules of engagement if you forgot them.)

5/18/2005 |

7 comments | No TrackBacks

Free Book Giveaway

Last year Apress ran a very cool Reviewer Program: you’d pick one book, read it and publish a review on your site or Amazon. In token of appreciation Apress would send you a couple of books of your choice! Now, isn’t it a great deal?

5/16/2005 |

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Book Review: Defensive Design for the Web

This book has been written by Matt Linderman and Jason Fried of 37signals. The premise of this book is: things go wrong at times no matter what. There are numerous ways to fill out a form with incorrect data, mistype a URL, or run a search which returns nothing. Can you foresee this happening and make sure you don’t hang visitors out to dry? Practice contingency design—design for when things go wrong.

5/16/2005 |

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How Much Can You Save With HTTP Compression?

I have added a new tool to my online toolbox which helps answer this very question. What it does is take a URL, download the page and analyze the gain from compression. If the page is already served compressed, it decompresses it and then repacks with gzip and various levels of deflate. Interestingly enough, the difference isn’t that huge and stays within 3%.

5/11/2005 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

GetXml() Output To Look Pretty Again

Ever since Visual Studio.NET 2002 retired, I’ve been missing an important feature: you could go to the Immediate window and type ?[DataSet].GetXml(). The output was a nicely formatted XML document. When VS.NET 2003 shipped this formatting was broken and thus became useless.

5/11/2005 |

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Subscription to Full Feed Now Available

If you’ve visited the site recently, you must’ve noticed a change—a new "feature", if you will. I spent last week adding a subscription system to this site, and I’m going to extend the feed to include some posts available by subscription only. See the registration page for further details. Basically, I’m kicking the effort up a notch here as I have bigger and better plans for the site. ;)

5/10/2005 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Help Improve Visual Studio.NET 2005

This one goes to all of you, developers and designers, regardless of whose war camp you are in. I’ve submitted two issues with Visual Studio.NET 2005 Beta 2, FDBK25806 and FDBK25803, via the MSDN Product Feedback Center which I deem critical, and I need your input or vote to have both resolved by the time VS.NET 2005 ships.

5/4/2005 |

3 comments | No TrackBacks

.Net Web Hosting with ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2

Derek Vaughan of CheapHostingDirectory.com sent me an overview of three companies providing .NET hosting (thank you, Derek!). I decided to pass it along in case you are in the market for ASP.NET hosting (including ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2). Here we go…

5/3/2005 |

6 comments | No TrackBacks

This Day in History: May 1st

To those who live in the States May 1st isn’t special in any way—it’s just like any other day of the week. If you are a European, you know it as Labor Day. You must’ve been observing it since childhood: who wouldn’t want a day off school or work?

5/1/2005 |

2 comments | No TrackBacks

Web talk

May 2005