DOCUMENT OUTLINE

Notes on DotNet

October 2006

So how's your Internet Explorer 7 performance? Early user reports have varied from speedy to pokey. Of course, the level of AJAX-based functionality on a site can affect the rendering speed, and the style of coding may favor IE over Firefox, or vice versa. With the proliferation of RIA development platforms, this issue is likely to grow more confusing. Perhaps we’ll see a return of icons stating "This site best view with..." For me, IE7 seems to be on par with Firefox, but I haven't had a chance yet to compare it to FF2.0, released a week after IE7. The health of each browsers' add-on market is another important metric. Three IE favorites of mine are the Developer Toolbar, the IESpell spell checker, and Fiddler, which lets you monitor and modify incoming or outgoing HTTP traffic.

Microsoft is also holding a contest to encourage add-on development. The contest will run from November until next February 9, 2007, and the winner receives a trip to Mix07 in Las Vegas and $2500 in walking-around money.

Posted by John Dorsey at 01:21 PM  Permalink |

Check out Scott Swigart's latest video tutorial. Scott takes a look at setting up ASP.NET cross-page postbacks in ASP.NET 2.0. It's easy to build a form on one page and post the information returned to a different page. He also shows how to perform a a simple check to make sure that the results page is being requested by a cross-page post rather than by a user typing in the URL of the results page directly

Posted by John Dorsey at 08:01 PM  Permalink |

Check out Michael Hunter's interview with Alan Page, a test architect on Microsoft's Engineering Excellence team. Alan discussed his philosophy on testing and the evolution of testing tools at Microsoft. He also notes that improvements in development tools are finding the "easy" bugs further upstream, so in the future testers are likely to spend more time uncovering the more-subtle bugs.

Speaking of testing, if you wanted to try out Windows Vista RC2, you had to act fast. Microsoft offered the download to technical beta testers, TAP testers, and MSDN/TechNet subscribers beginning on Friday, but by Monday afternoon, RC2 was no longer available. Apparently demand was too great, and Microsoft can only process feedback from a finite number of testers.

Posted by John Dorsey at 09:14 PM  Permalink |

Mike Riley recently interviewed Microsoft’s Parimal Deshpande, about the company’s User Experience (UX) initiative. The aim of UX is improve UIs at more than a cosmetic level. As Parimal stated, "If design matters then designers matter. If designers matter then they must to be made complete a part of the development process." Parimal talked about some of the UI tools that have been in development for sometime now that are nearing release.
Also, on DotNetJunkies the always-entertaining Kevin Daly has posted some notes about upgrading a sample client app to the latest version of WPF, such as the surprising impact that a window’s Title attribute has on successful interop.

Posted by John Dorsey at 02:39 PM  Permalink |