ASP.NET Resources

New Approach to Usability: Annoy Users

When I saw this article, Microsoft Exec: UAC Designed To ’Annoy Users’, (via Bryant Likes), I thought, “Nah, one of those April Fool’s jokes.” Then I looked at the date—April 10—and realized it wasn’t a joke. In fact, David Cross is quoted saying:

4/27/2008 |

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Communal Decision Making Sucks

Here’s something revolting I’ve experienced dealing with recently: board of directors. What comes to mind immediately is this excerpt from The Fountainhead:

4/24/2008 |

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Bait Station Ahead

Rick is asking, What can you keep in your head?

4/13/2008 |

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Slides from My Presentation on Usability

This is a presentation I gave back in March at the Connecticut .NET User Group, and in April at the Long Island .NET User Group.

4/13/2008 |

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Read Good Books to Be a Better Developer

Oren has published a list of his recommended reading and it reminded I wanted to write a post about this for some time. At the bottom on his post, Oren points to an observation that almost none of his books are on a specific technology. Let me come back to this point in a second.

4/3/2008 |

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The Best Design Coding Guidelines Ever

This must be the best video presentation on web standards and SEO. If you are so astounded by the clarity of the material that you can’t remember a thing, below are a few points to take away:

3/30/2008 |

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How Does MS AJAX Manage to Crash Firefox?

Another day, another idiosyncrasy. I’m implementing the IScriptControl interface and have the following line which crashes Firefox upon page unload:

3/12/2008 |

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Extender Control Just Won't Pick Up Localization

Imagine my surprise when, having gone through the AJAX localization tutorial and this MSDN article up, down and sideways, I couldn’t get my extender control to see resource strings on the client!

2/24/2008 |

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Usability Blooper: Dollar, You Ain't Helping

Here’s an interesting screenie from Dollar rent-a-car:

2/24/2008 |

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One Interesting Use of Explicitly Implemented Interfaces

When you see a discussion of explicit interfaces, it is usually about resolving clashes in their signatures (see Explicit Interface Implementation Tutorial).

2/24/2008 |

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Two Press Releases and Bad Copywriting

Compare these two artifacts that came from the gods of corporate communication:

2/22/2008 |

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Join the Dark Side

For months now I’ve been using a dark theme for my Visual Studio, and I’m loving it. To someone who spends days and days in front of a computer, a dark-grey “canvas” definitely puts less strain on the eyes.

2/17/2008 |

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Collection Interfaces Smell

Going back to Framework Design Guidelines, here’s a guideline pertaining to collections that I disagree with:

2/17/2008 |

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Scenario-Driven Design Violated To the Utmost

I like Framework Design Guidelines. It’s a nice guidebook on how to get everyone on your team on the same page and establish common coding practices. While re-reading it, I came across the principle of Scenario-Driven Design (sec 2.2.1) which states the following:

2/11/2008 |

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Achieving Code Symmetry

In my review of Kent Beck’s latest book, Implementation Patterns, I didn’t mean to present it as completely useless. It has some great points sprinkled throughout. It’s just that they are buried in trivialities. Still, one valuable concept Beck talks about in his book is that of code symmetry.

1/28/2008 |

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Sleek Use of a Lambda Expression

I can’t recall where I found it, but here's a sleek way to employ a lambda expression:

1/24/2008 |

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Where Is C# Heading?

A friend of mine (let’s call him Morpheus to conceal his identity) and I had a lovely chat about this helpful linkfest on immutability in C# (great posts there, btw!).

1/23/2008 |

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Creepy Implicitness

Generally, I’m not against implicit operators, but this LINQ/XML syntax gives me creeps:

1/23/2008 |

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Book Review: Implementation Patterns

When I saw Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck due for publication, I thought: “Kent Beck—yay! Patterns—yay! Famed Addison-Wesley signature series—yay!” I snatched a copy as soon as it came out. In retrospect, this book is nothing what I expected it to be.

1/20/2008 |

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Philly Code Camp Sample Code

I’d like to give very belated thanks to everyone who helped put together this year’s first Philadelphia Code Camp, which took place last Saturday. I also want to thank those of you who attended my LINQ presentation, Can we LINQ it? Yes, we can!

1/20/2008 |

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