Written by Matrich on 9th April, 2009
Today, I am joining the entire web community to celebrate the CSS Naked Day 2009. The qualification of celebrating the day is having your site has proper semantic markup and since my blog qualifies, then why not. Even with the css disabled, my site is well usable and understandable and that’s what the celebration is about.
The idea behind this event is to promote web standards (like proper semantic markup and a good hierarchy structure). On April 9th, many blogs and sites will strip all CSS during 24 hours (effectively 48 hours for international compliance) and show the content “unstyled” as if no CSS existed.
For more details, visit http://naked.dustindiaz.com/ and in case you got any running websites, you can follow join the celebration.
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Written by Matrich on 9th April, 2009
In all the web developments I do apart from sites based on SharePoint, I always develop using Firefox as a yardstick and after then, I try write a few IE tweaks especially for IE 6 to ensure that it displays the work well. Of course, you may ask yourself why I do this yet IE comes as the default browser of all Microsoft operating systems which definitely I am using. The reasons for this can be found in my post, Multiple IE-Single PC solution - IE Tester, I wrote sometime back and gave a solution of IE Tester.
Most web developers or designers when debugging use either virtual, multiple machines running different versions of IE. Recently, I found out that Microsoft had released a stand-alone tool, Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview, to help in the debugging process by incorporating IE6, IE7 and IE8 into this tool.
Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer is a stand-alone visual debugging tool that makes it faster and easier to migrate your sites from IE6 to IE7 or IE8. With SuperPreview, you can ensure that your Web sites work correctly in IE8 while also maintaining compatibility with earlier versions of IE.
SuperPreview shows your web pages rendered in IE6 and either IE7 or IE8, depending on which version you have installed on your machine. You can view the pages side by side or as an onion-skin overlay and use rulers, guides and zoom/pan tools to precisely identify differences in layout. You can even compare your page comp to how the targeted browsers render the page.
The tool also contains several other interesting things including pointer modes, image viewing, dom highlighting, positioning guides/rulers, layout views, zoom, thumbnail display. The free downloadable tool will only support Internet Explorer and in case you would like other browsers incorporated, you would need to part off with some fee.
For the web developers and designers, this is a great tool for you to test out and use.
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Written by Matrich on 4th April, 2009
As I was traversing the Internet, I found a great post about Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 showing a range of GUI’s that have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh (Mac), Windows, Linux, Symbian OS, over the years.
To me, the most amazing evolution is the one for the famous Macintosh. Mac has been known for great user interfaces and great products like iPhone, iPods, etc. and therefore great to see how their GUIs have evolved.
Check out the details at Webdesigner Depot.
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Written by Matrich on 13th March, 2009
ASP.NET MVC is a new approach for Microsoft developers to use to create dynamic data-driven web sites and follows in the same mold as other platforms such as Rails and Django. Model View Controller (MVC) is relatively a new phenomenon in ASP.NET and it is taking shape though it is kinda difficult for programmers used to the usual WebForms get into the MVC style. I am kinda luck that before I got into ASP.NET programming, I was already using the MVC in some of my web applications using mainly CodeIgniter, a great PHP framework.
Luckily, ScottGu, the Corporate Vice President f Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division has been kind enough and released, free of charge, the first chapter of a new book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 which is still under production.
The chapter walks you through how to build a small but complete application “NerdDinner” using ASP.NET MVC and introduces some of the core concepts behind it. NerdDinner is an Open Source ASP.NET MVC Project that helps nerds and computer people plan, find or organize get-togethers online.
The free chapter download is available at http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvc and the site live at http://www.nerddinner.com. The whole application code is available at CodeProject.
Great thanks to ScottGu and I must say that the application really looks cool which isn’t a common thing with most of the free applications built out there. I have looked at many of them including developer’s blog and I wonder whether these don’t require nice looking interfaces to their applications and interfaces.
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Written by Matrich on 10th March, 2009
For the developers or well-wishers out there into Microsoft programming languages, Microsoft Press recently released Microsoft Press books introducing Visual Studio 2008.
Microsoft Press books deliver the accurate, from-the-source information that you need to take your skills and knowledge to the next level.
There is a free e-book offer where you can some of the chapters from these recent publications:
- Programming Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo
- Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 by Dino Esposito
- Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2, Second Edition
Have fun with these new technologies as we prepare for those coming up in Visual Studio 2010.
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Written by Matrich on 9th February, 2009
Lately, I am involved in designing architecture of several applications and planning how the different components of an application should interact with each other and where they should be stored. We work mostly with .NET Framework and I found a great resource of Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 that focuses on designing applications on the .NET framework.
This guide provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the .NET Framework. It focuses on the most common types of applications, partitioning application functionality into layers, components, and services, and walks through their key design characteristics.This guide is a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, product teams, and industry experts.
What a great opportunity to get how something was designed to work from the originators and experts in that field. This should be very valuable to software architects and developers aiming not only to build something which works but building smart applications using the right tools. It is also supplemented with a Video: Train the Trainer - Application Architecture Guide 2.0 which I hope you will enjoy too.
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