ASP.NET Resources

Sucky Usability of Country Pickers

Recently, I had to rework a submission form which had a country picker—the kind you see on almost every e-commerce site. Besides the traditional long list of countries, the old picker attempted to be smart by also listing regions / prefectures / states / provinces.

8/24/2008 |

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3.5 SP1: All the Drag-and-Drop You Can Eat

Last night the Microsoft Traveling Circus rolled into town for a special session of “What’s new in .NET 3.5 SP1.”

8/1/2008 |

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A Tale of Software Rewrites

What follows below is an excerpt from Michael Feathers’ book Working Effectively with Legacy Code. You can find it in Chapter 24, “We feel overwhelmed. It isn’t going to get any better.” In fact, I was sure this was a stand-alone essay, in the likes of those by Paul Graham, but it was nowhere to be found online. It is just too good to pass up, so I shamelessly reproduce it here.

7/25/2008 |

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Being the People's Voice in Usability Debates

What happens when you get a bunch of people to discuss construction of User Interface (UI) is best depicted by Steve Krug in Don’t Make Me Think:

7/20/2008 |

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The Book Is Here!

The book I’m referring to is Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls For .NET Framework 3.5 (I know, long title) by Adam Calderon and Joel Rumerman. No, I’m not crazy enough to write a book. I was a technical reviewer on this project with Addison-Wesley. Doing a thorough technical review takes a lot of time (part of the reason I’ve been so quiet lately). Writing a programming book takes an insane amount of time and brings no money.

7/6/2008 |

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Live.com: Where Is Alignment?

Since the last redesign of Live.com, I kept waiting for them to do something about the apparent lack of alignment. Alignment is one of the very basic principles of UI design. I discussed it back when I had fun with the latest rendering of Microsoft.com.

6/29/2008 |

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Is This An Error?

Here’s a dialog box from Visual Studio 2008 Team System:

6/29/2008 |

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MVC + Traditional ASP.NET = Deadly Combination

A couple of years ago Billy McCafferty wrote about an approach to bring the Model-View-Presenter pattern (MVP) to the ASP.NET. Since then I’ve seen a couple of permutations of the technique, and numerous attempts to actually make it work.

6/20/2008 |

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Seventh Beta of The Seventh Beta

I simply can’t resist posting this graphic from Microsoft Connect:

6/20/2008 |

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In Search Of Best Methodology

There was a time when Agile ~~nazis~~ zealots used to make me feel bad. I’d feel guilty about not following The Agile by the book. We did not do stickies with user stories, had no burn–down chart, did not calculate velocity, etc. We had a similar, less intricate process, and it worked reasonably well for our needs.

6/20/2008 |

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Error Conditions and Little Typos

A friendly reminder from Head First Labs:

5/22/2008 |

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The Easiest Thing to Do Should Be the Right Thing to Do

If you haven’t read Michael Nygard’s book Release It!, you absolutely need to! It’s heavy on the infrastructure side of things, which isn’t my strength, but it’s an eye-opener to a lot of real-world issues I never considered. It’s also just fun to read.

5/15/2008 |

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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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