I have found that .NET really lacks in this space, needless to say I've been scouring the web for a decent free UML designer. Annoyingly most of the free UML tools have heavy restrictions on there use ( VP , MagicDraw ), oh and Visio is hopeless for complex diagrams. NetBeans comes with an awesome UML...

Jeff Atwood rants about the typical 404 page , saying "the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it's yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak." Jeff lays out 5 ways to make the 404 error page better...

I know that generally the design patterns promote programming to an interface not an implementation - and this provides more loose coupling, and helps keep inheritance trees down. My personal opinion is that component based programming is really nice, but I see few people actually implementing the component...

Raymond says that dialog boxes are not the place for logic puzzles . I ran across a configuration dialog box that had the item "Turn off Feature X". This is a negative-sense checkbox, which turns your dialog box into a logic puzzle. Checkboxes should be phrased positively. "Use Feature X". (The only...

Recently, I tried to accomplish a simple task on a website which frustrated me because what should have been simple, was not. All I wanted to do was go to the Mix website and quickly find links to my sessions so I could post them here. Even I should be able to figure this out. As a note, I’m using the...