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 […]

September 29, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Web

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 […]

September 28, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: General

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 […]

September 25, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET, Web

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 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: General

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 = { […]

September 16, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: .NET

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 […]

September 15, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

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, […]

September 13, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

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 […]

September 7, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

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, […]

September 4, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 7 Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Cloud