December 2003 - Posts

• Read weblogs.asp.net on your WAP-enabled mobile phone

  My friend, Russell Pooley has come up with a *sweet* WAP gateway that consumes the weblogs.asp.net RSS and makes it available over a WAP-enabled phone, like my shiny new Orange SPV E200. It's here. Posted Dec 05 2003, 08:53 AM by mjreynolds with no comments

• I'm not a big fan of status bars...

  ...I find them tricky to interact with programatically, and no one ever looks at them anyway, but this morning, this quote from Chris Sells' Windows Forms Programming in C# really ticked me: Pg 106: “According to legent, Microsoft did a usability study [of the status bar] awareing people $50 if they would look under their chair, putting the notification for this award in the status bar.  The $50 went unclaimed during the testing.” Posted Dec 05 2003, 08:14 AM by mjreynolds with 6 comment(s)

• High resolution timer

  Windows' basic timing APIs tend to be inaccurate - sometimes by up to 15ms or so.  Peter Bromberg has an article on Egg Head Cafe on High Precision Code Timing in .NET.  The article includes a simple class that uses Windows' performance monitoring APIs to create a super accurate timer. Posted Dec 03 2003, 10:21 AM by mjreynolds with no comments

• "Designed for Windows XP" Application Specificiation

  I've learned a *lot* about good Windows application design from reading the specification that an app must adhere to to get the “Designed for Windows XP” logo. http://www.microsoft.com/winlogo/software/default.mspx The “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP“ Application Specification 2.3 cleared up for me a lot of the more enterprise related issues - including why it's a good thing to use the My Documents folder, where to put your data in order to enable roaming and how to lock down Windows 2000 and XP to get an idea of how applicaitons run in the enterprise, rather than on a (usually wide open) dev box.   Posted Dec 03 2003, 08:32 AM by mjreynolds with no comments