17 October 2006 in Business & Code | Comments (0)

So lately it’s been a bit try on new material around this place so I thought I’d write a bit about what I’ve been doing instead of tapping away at my keyboard lately. Actually, no, scratch that, I’ve still be at the keyboard a lot but recently I’ve been trying to read more. I’ve always enjoyed reading but in the last 18 months or so I’d only read a couple of books which was making me feel a bit guilty.

I virtually never read fiction, I don’t see the point as I read to learn something new. So here is a list of what I’m working my way through at the moment:

• Micro-ISV, From vision to reality
• Eric Sink on the business of software
• Software project survival guide
• A practical guide of feature-driven development
• Framework design guidelines
• Programming Visual C# 2005: The base class library
• The fingerprint of God

I’ll try and write a review of each of them as I complete them, I’ve already knocked off two of them so I’ll try and get that post up in the next few days.

As you can see, my primary interests in what I read is IT & business. The only odd one out is ‘The Fingerprint of God’ which is mostly about physics, a pet interest of mine. Are there any books you could recommend for me to add to my list?

- JD

24 August 2006 in .Net & Code & Events & Intergen & Windows | Comments (3)

First off, it was fantastic. I’ve only been to TechEd twice but Microsoft put on a great event. Everything went unbelievably smoothly and the atmosphere was really good. We arrived on Sunday afternoon and everything was already humming.

I managed to attend quite a few sessions and all of them had great speakers.

One thing that I didn’t expect, but was happily surprised about, was that the Live initiative really is shaping up to be a compelling offering across the board. My earlier reservations have been quashed and I’m looking forward to the further development of the Live platform over the next six months. I guess the key message I would share about this is that perhaps while the live.com portal might not be your kettle of fish, the other services really are quite compelling.

Speaking of Live, the Web in general was well discussed. Rowan Simpson from TradeMe presented a few times and was an excellent speaker. I think he added some balance to the event – making it clear the back end doesn’t matter if you don’t solve a problem for your end users in an easy to use manner. Congratulations to them on achieving 1 billion page views per month as well, that’s impressive.

Office 2007 was represented very well at TechEd. I attended several sessions about Office and picked up a few things. The whole stack of Office, Vista and Live is going to be compelling.

Intergen, where I work, was running the hands on labs again this year which is always enjoyable and a great way to meet other people attending TechEd. Hopefully everyone tried them out and learnt a lot.

TechFest was a heap of fun. It was similar to last years event however that was great considering the success of last year. This was another great place to meet other people in the industry but, sadly, we couldn’t convince any of the ladies at TechFest that were near to jump up on my shoulders for The Feelers however I was pleased to see more representation of woman in technology at TechEd this year . Some of us ended up at Globe and had a great time there until the wee hours (as well as meeting even more great folks).

Then last night we had the mad dash to the airport. As much as I love TechEd it’s just long enough to make me appreciate being back in my own bed I’m sure everyone else had a great time.

This post is quite a quick brain dump of my thoughts, I’ll probably follow up over the next few days with this I remember as being useful or cool

- JD

18 August 2006 in .Net & Code | Comments (0)

Just a heads up to folks who still work with Visual Studio 2003 that Visual Studio 2003 SP1 has been released and includes a tonne of fixes. A reasonably big 150MB+ download but should be worth it.

Download SP1 here

Read the release notes here

 - JD

17 August 2006 in .Net & Code | Comments (3)

Having only been out a couple of days there are already plugins for Live Writer coming out which is fantastic to see. There have been some people ripping on Live Writer for missing some features (like tagging and flickr support) and disregarded what I see as one of the most powerful features of Live Writer – a pluggable API (download the SDK here).

Already up are the following plug-ins:

• Flickr4Writer – A plugin to insert your images from Flickr
• Tag4Writer – A plugin to insert tags (Including Technorati integration)
• Currently Listening – For all the people who think we want to know what you’re listening to

I’m looking forward to seeing some of the more funky plugins that come out over the next few weeks Keep in mind these are first version plugins so your mileage may vary.

 - JD

17 August 2006 in Code & Intergen | Comments (1)

Many of us know that it’s a good idea to ensure what we develop is compliant with relevant standards (HTML 4.01, XHTML, maybe even E-Government Web Guidelines). However when it comes to actually ensuring that you’re developing sites that conform to these types of standards it can be difficult to validate that you’re doing it right.

I’m not going to delve into E-Government Web Guidelines in this post (it’s a much bigger kettle of fish than I can bring myself to write about at he moment) but will look at some tools that I find invaluable in aiding the development of pages that conform to W3C HTML & XHTML standards.

The Web Developer Toolbar

This is a fantastic extension to FireFox. It gives you great features – more than you would want me to talk about here – just trust me, it’s amazing. A couple of highlight features however that make standards development easier:

• Validate Local HTML
  This uses the doc type and submits local HTML to the appropriate W3C Validator. Perfect for dev environments where your pages are not publicly accessible.
• Validate Local CSS
  Same as above but for CSS
• Validate Feed, Links, Section 508 and WAI
  Each of these does their own validation, but can’t be done from local unfortunately but still fantastic for meeting more standards.

On top of this there are features that just help you out in a big way. Several features that I use almost every day when tinkering with HTML:

• View Style Information
  This gives you a cross hair to click anywhere on the page and it shows you exactly which styles, from what CSS file, are being applied at that point!
• Outline Table & Block Elements
  Rather than applying border styles to everything, just click the button and see where the tables and block level elements are. Colour coded for extra greatness.
• View Source
  Doesn’t sound like a biggy but it opens the source in a background tab, not a new window – fantastic.

As I mention, there are hundreds more features. If you touch HTML at all this extension should be installed right after FireFox. Click here to visit the homepage of the Web Developer Toolbar.

Web Accessibility Toolbar

This tool is an add-in to Internet Explorer and adds much of the functionality that the Web Developer Toolbar adds to FireFox. There are a few differences but they’re similar enough for me not to write heaps about this tool (refer to my feature comments about the Web Developer Toolbar).

Click here to get the Web Accessibility Toolbar.

Both of these tools should be installed, especially if you’re doing ASP.Net development as the server controls in ASP.Net render differently depending on the browser you’re using (you can make some changes using Browser Caps if you’re interesting in really getting into it).

- JD

16 August 2006 in Blogging & Business & Code | Comments (3)

So you’ve got a pretty popular site. Perhaps you have an e-commerce component to your site. Every single person browsing your site is a prospect. You’ve done well – you’ve build a standard compliant site, you invested in making the shopping experience easy and you provide lots of information about your products.

Now what?

It’s not like you’d open a retail store, stock it up, and then have all your staff sit behind the counter waiting for people to bring their products over to purchase. So why do you let people just roam around your site without engaging them? Or making it easier to engage you? This is a huge area and well worth investigating – how can you engage your site visitors more?

You may recall that earlier in the year I started using Meebo to chat online. It allows you to chat using various networks through a unified rich website (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Jabber). Recently they added an addition to their product line up called “Meebo Me” which is a widget that you can integrate into any HTML page and gives you the power to communicate with site visitors and them the power to communicate with you. All this without needing the site visitor sign-in or register. It’s a fantastic way of communicating with your visitors and letting them ask questions.

Users can choose to disable the chat feature if they don’t want it which is useful for those who don’t want to be interrupted. It also shows when the web master is offline and allows end users to give themselves a name. It’s all powered by flash but is slick enough for that not to be a big problem.

On top of this you can also see how long a user has been on a page. Perhaps you might want to interact with users if they have been on a page for more than 10 minutes – perhaps they’re thinking about what you’ve written and have a question? It’s just like a retail shop – “You seem to be interested in that product, can I provide any help?”.

We’ve come a long way from static pages where users couldn’t interact. At the moment the big deal is being able to control content. The next step is certainly going to be owned by companies that are willing to invest in getting to know their customers.

- JD

8 July 2006 in .Net & Code | Comments (1)

From time to time I enjoy doing WinForms development and quite often I find myself frustrated with some of the controls that come “out of the box”. Normally I end up overriding controls or, worse yet, writing them from scratch. Because of this I often keep an eye out of control libraries. There are some fantastic libraries out there but I thought I’d share the Component Factory suite which is free for both personal and corporate use.

Check out the Component Factory homepage for more details.

– JD

21 June 2006 in Code | Comments (2)

I’ve been a huge fan of Akismet for stopping spam on my blog ever since it came out. I’ve never had such a simple solution that was so fantastically effective. And now somebody has written a .net 2.0 wrapper (there is a 1.1 one was well) to use it. This presents a very easy way of integrating fantastic spam protection into your .Net web applications if required.

Check out the post about the Akisment .Net wrapper here.

Akismet is written by the same guys that developed WordPress which powers my blog.

- JD

P.S. Heaps of plugins for this service have been coming out recently. If you’re using VBulletin, PHPBB or a huge array of other web applications there may already be a plugin for you.