Archive for September, 2009
Google starts showing anchor links on pages
Sometimes long pages need additional navigation and anchors get introduced. Google recently started pulling your table of contents to the search results.
As announced in the Official Google blog:
As you can see, the start of the Wikipedia article’s table of contents has been pulled in as the four links above the URI. It’s interesting how vaguely [...]
September 29, 2009
Tags: Google, search Posted in: Web 
One Comment
More on future UIs
A while ago I wrote on Microsoft Courier and the UI design implications such a form factor would have. A bit farther in the future, it’s getting even more hardcore.
Long Zheng has a nice post on Microsoft’s most recent future office video (if an 8-minute video is too long, check out the images). What we’re [...]
September 28, 2009
Tags: future, user interface Posted in: General One Comment
Why is WebsiteSpark relevant?
Scott Guthrie of Microsoft launched a new program yesterday. Joining BizSpark for new software companies and DreamSpark for students, the new WebsiteSpark is intended to power up small web development companies.
In a nutshell, this is WebsiteSpark:
If you’re a small company (< 10 employees) building web sites, you get a bunch of licenses, training and support [...]
September 25, 2009
Tags: entrepreneurship, strategy, WebsiteSpark Posted in: .NET, Web No Comments
What does Microsoft Courier mean for UI developers?
So now the rumors of the Microsoft’s next stab at the tablet market seem to be getting more meat around them. And while Courier may never even see the light, it’s a good time to stop and think about the potential developer impact.
If all of the above was unfamiliar to you, check out Gizmodo’s [...]
September 23, 2009
Tags: Courier, UI, usability Posted in: General One Comment
Collection initialization is not construction
The ability to initialize collections is a great feature of C# 3.0, but it may not work exactly as you expected.
Consider the following class:
internal class MyListContainer
{
internal List<object> MyObjects { get; set; }
}
Now, imagine a call site that does the following:
MyListContainer mlc = new MyListContainer
{
MyObjects = { DateTime.Now, new [...]
September 16, 2009
Tags: C# Posted in: .NET No Comments
Url encoding in so many ways
After over ten years of web programming, I would have expected to know my way around various encoding methods. It turned out there was one more called UrlPathEncode that I hadn’t actively registered.
So here’s the hopefully final stab on the issue:
When you’re encoding a query string parameter for an HTML link, use Server.UrlEncode (HttpServerUtility.UrlEncode). It [...]
September 15, 2009
Tags: URI, Web Posted in: .NET No Comments
Quotation marks either work or are beautiful
It’s nice that sophisticated text editors apply correct quoting, using the “more beautiful” quotes instead of just the "standard" ones you get from the keyboard. Typological correctness is great. Until you paste code.
I recently wrote about getting jQuery IntelliSense working with MVC projects. Well, I went out and copy/pasted the code from the article, not [...]
September 13, 2009
Tags: Live Writer, Visual Studio Posted in: .NET One Comment
Why should you attack incorrect parameter name casing now?
Who cares if your C# method parameters are called “int customerId”, “int CustomerID” or whatever? Well, soon you will!
For the short history of C#, method parameter names have been like private variables to C# developers: Their names don’t make a difference and can be changed at any time.
Yet technically, changing method argument names is an [...]
September 7, 2009
Tags: C#, coding conventions Posted in: .NET No Comments
The death of Live Services – what to expect?
By now the Windows Live oriented people have probably heard the news: the Live Services infrastructure, including Live Framework, is shutting down on next Tuesday. Live Mesh will stay online, but the developer CTP version will be discontinued – until it is merged with the Windows Live offering.
A short history
Announced in PDC 2008, Live Framework [...]
September 4, 2009
Tags: Azure, Live Mesh, Live Services, Windows Live Posted in: Cloud 4 Comments