September 2007 - Posts
I have a theory that you can't build amazingly great products if you don't deeply know the customer. An d the best way to get the visceral and lasting impression is to physically go see the customer work in their own environment. This where I need your help. I am looking to get smarter about the way custom application development in small business really works. While Microsoft has some great feedback channels for large ISVs and large business. The small business is a slightly harder area for us because of its breath. My, somewhat crazy, idea is to get folks from my team physically outside of the Microsoft campus and get a first hand experience of what life is like for folks doing custom application development in small businesses. To make the...
I have a theory that you can't build amazingly great products if you don't deeply know the customer. An d the best way to get the visceral and lasting impression is to physically go see the customer work in their own environment. This where I need your help. I am looking to get smarter about the way custom application development in small business really works. While Microsoft has some great feedback channels for large ISVs and large business. The small business is a slightly harder area for us because of its breath. My, somewhat crazy, idea is to get folks from my team physically outside of the Microsoft campus and get a first hand experience of what life is like for folks doing custom application development in small businesses. To make the...
One of the subtle (but cool) new language features in the VS 2008 version of C# is the ?? "null coalescing" operator. This provides a nice, terse way to check whether a value is null, and if so return an alternate value. Simple Example Usages Several folks have blogged about the ?? operator in the past - read here , here , here , and here for some previous examples on how to use it. Simply put, the ?? operator checks whether the value provided on the left side of the expression is null, and if so it returns an alternate value indicated by the right side of the expression. If the value provided on the left side of the expression isn't null, then it returns the original value. For example, let's assume we have a string variable "message". We could...
While I am bummed that I am not able to go to AJAXWorld this time, I am super excited about some of the great stuff I see going on there. Joe Stagner is going to give a killer keynote on "AJAX in the balance". Joe totally gets open source, standards and sometimes, the need for full bet-your-business 24x7 support. I can't wait to see what he does with this thing. In addition, there looks like a bunch of cool sessions: Jesse Liberty - on building Silverlight applications sessions Joe Stagner on the ASP.NET AJAX platform Patrick Ruzand on ASP.NET AJAX Controls... Robert Boedigheimer on the ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit Dave Wright - on building Cloud Data Services with "Astoria" Dave Wolf (from Cynergy) - will talk about rich user experience on...
VS2005 introduced the ability to validate your markup and CSS for standards compliance alongside your code. It’s a great feature, but it can be frustrating when you’re looking for that one critical compilation error underneath a pile of validation errors. Well, we heard your feedback and added two new options in VS2008: 1) “downgrade” HTML/CSS errors to warnings, 2) “downgrade” JScript errors to warnings. The Two New Options The VS2005 Default Experience The VS2008 Default Experience We hope this will separate the validation clutter way from what is stopping your build. You can visually distinguish the warnings from the errors in the text editor as the warnings use green squiggles. It’s worthwhile to note that both options also (implicitly)...
Joel Spolsky posts about where Ajax development might be headed, and alludes to compiling down to JavaScript. Script# is based on a similar philosophy... Read More...
One of the features that VS 2005 added was support for HTML source validation . This enabled you to validate your page markup against different HTML schemas and standards (XHTML Transitional/Strict, HTML 4.01, various browser types, etc). You could also use the HTML validation features to detect missing link, image or style references in your markup. For example, if you have an HTML hyperlink in your page that points to a local file that doesn't exist, or if your markup uses (or misuses) HTML or CSS content, you'll by default see red squiggles in the source editor: And if the html document is open you'll by default see these issues listed in the error list: Note: if you don't want HTML validation support at all you can optionally turn off the...
I am very excited that Phil Haak is joining the ASP.NET product team... He will bring a wealth of industry experience, community connections and energy to the team. We lured him in with promises of endless sunny days in Seattle and a chance to be the program manager for a new MVC framework for ASP.NET (more details on that soon, stay tuned)... Welcome Phil! Read More...
Whew, I'm back from my 17 day cruise in the Mediterranian and while it's good to be back, I sure missed a lot! I'm still trying to get things sorted, but in the mean time I figured I'd share this little juicy bit with you. Verio is offering free Windows based hosting for anyone who wants it! They don't require a credit card, and the offer is good through January 2010, so you get a good couple of years out of this. The offer is not available online (huh?), so you have to call and deal with a human. And since it's a 1-800 number, that'll make it a bit harder for those outside the USA. In any event, if you want to take advantage of it, call Verio at 1.800.932.7483! And feel free to pass along Read More...
I have immense respect for Douglas Crockford, but that doesn't mean I can't disagree with him... Douglas has written on a number of occasions that he prefers plain script tags, with no attributes. The argument goes like this: "This script block uses the language attribute. This was a feature that was introduced by Microsoft in order to support VBScript. Netscape then adopted it to support its own nonstandard deviations. W3C did not adopt the language attribute, favoring instead a type attribute which takes a MIME type. Unfortunately, the MIME type was not standardized, so it is sometimes "text/javascript" or "application/ecmascript" or something else. Fortunately, all browsers will always choose JavaScript as the default programming language...
More Posts
« Previous page -
Next page »