ASP.NET Resources

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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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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