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Blogs » Archive for October, 2007
A Survival Guide for ASP.NET Developers
I’m very proud to announce the availability of our latest release, The ASP.NET 2.0 Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks.
If you’re wading through lines of ASP.NET code every day — or even if you just dabble occasionally — then this book is a must-have companion for trekking through the ASP.NET jungle.
It features some of the biggest names in ASP.NET, and I can guarantee that these guys know their stuff. I should know — I was the technical editor for the book. They show you the most practical features, the best approaches, and help you get off the beaten path — in short, the stuff that matters.
Of course, if you enjoy stumbling through pages of pointless reference material, then by all means shop around. But if you’re looking for an ASP.NET book with truckloads of easy-to-use ASP.NET solutions, make sure you check it out.
Comment-Driven Development
You’ve probably heard about Test Driven Development, a programming methodology which focusses on test cases as a framework for designing and developing code. You may also have heard of Behavior Driven Development, a more holistic approach which focusses on the behavior of an application before and during the development process.
Well let me tell you about my programming methodology — Comment Driven Development. Start by writing a comment, in plain language, that explains what a piece of code is supposed to do, and why. Then write the code.
Sometimes this is the most direct way to approach a problem; if it’s easy to explain but difficult to express in logic, the internal discourse you get from writing it down in this way can help clarify your thinking towards a logical solution. Conversely, sometimes it’s easy to write the code but much harder to explain it; in that case writing the comment can help you clarify the purpose of the code in such a way as to make it explainable to other people. The act of writing the comment is like a pre-cursor to documentation.
And indeed, there are times when I’m writing a comment and I find that my thinking on the code …
Usability: More than Skin Deep at Web Directions
At Web Directions South 2007 in Sydney, SitePoint usability blogger Lisa Herrod (aka Scenario Girl) proposed a new way of looking at usability and accessibility within the web design process. Not only does her approach point the way to better user experience design, but it also brings formal accessibility testing within reach of small web development teams!
Lisa led off boldly with what I felt was a tough sell to some members of the audience: that user experience design is by definition incomplete unless it takes accessibility into account at every stage of a project. To soften the blow, however, she demonstrated how the ‘personas’ used in usability work could be adapted to include common disabilities without diminishing their usefulness for gauging other usability factors.
No matter how you approach it, of course, accounting for accessibility within the development of a site is going to mean more work. But whose work should it be? Most businesses can’t afford to have a full-time accessibility expert on staff, and will either call in a contractor to do a last-minute accessibility review, or put the responsibility on the shoulders of the front-end designer.
And the iPod Touch goes to…
At the Web Directions South conference in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, SitePoint ran a competition for conference-goers to win an iPod Touch. To enter, attendees had to answer the question, Why do you love the Web?
The competition drew an enormous number of entries that were funny, serious and just plain weird. However, after much deliberation I’m pleased to announce that we have selected a winner.
Teresa Ko, from NSW, is the lucky winner of a brand new iPod Touch. Teresa summarised her love for the Web in poem:
The World Wide Web, a wonderful thing,
Throughout the globe, all encompassing.
Information abound, on every conceivable topic,
Access the Web from everywhere—
Even whilst holidaying in the tropics!
Though there’s progress to be made yet—
Accessibility! Have standards been met?
Not all earthlings are yet digitally connected,
Not all computers Net Nanny-ed, children protected,
The web is for all, every age, race and creed,
The web has something for you, for anything that you need.
My iPod Touch quest concludes, as my words flow and ebb,
Now ends my ode as to why I love the Web!
There were two runners up, and the following folks will each be receiving a SitePoint book of their choice:
Ignacio …
Client-side Load Balancing Web 2.0 Apps is Voodoo
Digital Web recently published an article about “Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications”. I wanted to take a moment to explain why I think this load balancing technique is a bad idea. But first, here’s the concept in brief:
- Your web site is deployed in an identical fashion across a number of web servers.
- Your customer’s browser retrieves a list of web app servers from your server, say in XML format.
- The browser then “randomly selects servers to call until one responds”, and “has a preset timeout for each call. If the call takes greater than the preset time, the client randomly selects another server until it finds one that responds”.
No matter how long and hard I think about this concept, I can’t convince myself that it even sounds good in theory. Here’s why:
- We still have a single point of failure. What happens if our web application is not able to retrieve a valid list of servers?
- Correctly failing over is difficult and ungraceful. How much “preset time” should the client allow before trying another server? Is this waiting period acceptable to our customers? Can the application accurately tell the difference between a server being …
Skinning and color palettes with HSV and transparent PNGs
I work on the Ajaxy Web UI for Chandler Server (a.k.a. Cosmo), an open-source server that works with the Chandler personal information manager (PIM). You can take a look at the Web UI by creating an account on our free online service, Chandler Hub.
As we started implementing more and more of the calendar features in the Web UI, I eventually needed a set of color palettes to use for each of the users’ calendars, so they can tell them apart at a glance. (Next step is letting users pick the color for a calendar like Chandler Desktop can.)
Each calendar for a user would need a palette of similar colors for the events, complete with pretty gradients to make the event blocks pop out a bit in the UI. Since this is a very JavaScript-heavy Web UI, I needed to do this in the most lightweight way possible. A bunch of different images for each separate color was not ideal due to the huge download that would require.
I ended up using two tricks together that gave me a huge variety of colors and shades, and only used two images.
Transparent PNGs for color gradients
The first trick, suggested to me by my buddy …
.NET Framework Source Code to be Released!
Scott Guthrie has made the very, very cool announcement that the bulk of the .NET framework source code will be released! If you have ever spent hours trying to decypher ASP.NET in reflector, or pulling your hair out trying to make custom controls play well, this should make you a very happy person.
Free PDF Giveaway Takes Down SitePoint
The SitePoint file server crashed overnight because of a massive influx of traffic due to our FREE download offer of “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications”. In fact, we were getting over 200 simultaneous download requests when the server crashed!
We’ve now setup a copy of the eBook on Amazon’s S3, ensuring that we can handle many more download requests at the same time.
Grab your free copy of our Ruby on Rails Book today and spread the word!
SitePoint’s Ruby on Rails Book is now FREE
I’m very happy to announce that for the next 60 days our book Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Applications is FREE* in PDF Format (a $29.95 USD value).
That’s right… Not an extract… Not a sample chapter… The ENTIRE 447 pages of Patrick Lenz’s incredible book is (for the next 60 days) free to download.
From installing Ruby, Rails and MySQL, to building and deploying a fully featured web application, this book has it all. Imagine building a Web 2.0 social news application, while learning the ins-and-outs of Ruby on Rails. This book shows you how to do it, step by step …
It’s no wonder this book has been described as the best Ruby on Rails beginners’ book on the market.
If you’ve ever thought about trying out Ruby on Rails, you’ll never get a better chance to learn why everyone’s talking about this revolutionary web development framework. Grab your FREE download today …
Feel free to spread the word to anyone who may be interested in Ruby on Rails, or anyone who just likes getting stuff for free :)
By the way, if you prefer your books in hardcopy format, you …
Yahoo! Search Marketing Plays catch-up to AdWords
Yahoo! Search Marketing is finally catching up to AdWords and has launched new features (and highlighted old ones) to enable advertisers to exercise more control over where their ad dollars are going.
Among them:
Blocked Domains
Now you can specify websites in our partner distribution network where you don’t want your ads to appear.
Blocked Continents
Yahoo! automatically excludes traffic from continents other than North America. If global traffic is important to your business, you can opt into this traffic.
Both are steps in the right direction, though the blocked domains feature would be even more useful if it enabled advertisers to block ads from appearing on entire categories of webpages (such as domain name parking pages), a feature that is also badly lacking in AdWords.
Likewise, the blocked continent feature would be a lot more useful if Yahoo! allowed country-by-country targeting like Google does. Right now if you want to reach into Western Europe (Germany, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, etc.) you’re also forced to pay for traffic from Eastern Europe where the revenue-per-click is likely to be much lower.
I applaud the step in the right direction, but even more needs to be done for Yahoo! to catch-up to Google AdWords.
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