Pixel8

4 Elements of Professional WPF Applications

craigshoemaker — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Composite Application Guidance for WPF: Prism Goes Prime Time

The WPF answer to CAB is the Composite Application Guidance for WPF, formerly codename Prism.

NOTE:Since the full name is too formal, too long and I can’t with a straight face refer to a development platform as "CAG", we’ll just continue to refer to this technology herein by its code name: Prism. Cool? :)

In this podcast we speak with Brain Noyes of IDesign. Brian is not only an original advisor and consultant to the Patterns and Practices group for Prism, but he is also a prolific writer, an INETA member, Microsoft MVP, ASP Insider and Microsoft Regional Director for the Mid-Atlantic region. With a guy as decorated as Brian, you’d think he was in the military!

What is Prism?

Prism is a set of guidance from the Patterns and Practices group that aids in building composite WPF applications. To be clear though:

Prism is not a new application block
Prism is not a new framework
Prism is not a new software factory (Prism does not feature automation)

Well now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what is Prism?

Prism is:

A set of libraries - named the Composite Application Library or CAL
Patterns, documentation and sample code
A reference application which mimics a real-world line-of-business application
A series of quick starts that demonstrate Prism’s discrete features

What is a composite application?

Large applications whose user interface layer is not modularized end up with a monolithic code base that becomes very difficult to extend and maintain. Without breaking apart the user interface layer maintenance is hampered and working with large or distributed development teams proves difficult.

Often in WPF developers try to modularize by breaking the UI into user controls. Unfortunately, user controls end up needing intimate knowledge of each other so the maintenance problem is displaced rather than assuaged.

A composite application (in the UI sense) breaks the user interface into smaller, independent pieces where testing and development proceed in isolation.

Where Did Prism Come From?

The Patterns and Practices group did something very different before coding began for Prism. Rather than host early looks inside what the group had cooking under the covers, the team at Microsoft reached out to several industry professionals asking them, "What do you want us to build?" After digesting the feedback the team started first by building a real-world application – using the program to drive the development of the guidance.

Further back on the timeline, many of the techniques found in the Prism guidance came from the lessons learned and techniques that emerged from building the first large-scale WPF application, Expression Blend. Blend not only demonstrates what is possible in WPF, but also proves the hypothesis that a substantial application can be built using a composable user interface.

What Are the Basic Elements of Prism?

The four natural breaking points of Prism are:

Modularity*: A class library with single provides the lone entry point for a feature. Modules act as logical wrappers for portions of your application.

Prism features module enumerators for creating and locating modules at run-time, and a module loader which instantiates modules for the application.
Regions: In the same way that ASP.NE T master pages host content placeholders, a Prism region is a placeholder for modules. This approach gives the application the flexibility it needs to load in the appropriate features and associated UI elements as needed.
Composite Commands: Extends WPF routed commands to be loosely-coupled from the visual tree and dispatch commands to multiple handlers.
Loosely Coupled Events*: This new eventing mechanism features:
- The definition of the publisher and subscriber to exist at any layer of the application
- Type and lifetime decoupling between the publisher and subscriber, but with a strongly-typed communication model
- One line of code on the sender and receiver side
- Dispatch threads on the UI thread, publisher’s thread or a thread from the pool
- Provide filter criteria using lambdas or delegate methods to decide whether or not to notify the subscriber when the publisher’s event fires

* The modularity and eventing mechanisms are independent of WPF and may be used to support other UI technologies.

What About Performance?

Any layer of abstraction will affect performance. Load testing revealed the performance impact is realized upon instantiation of the forms. Using dependency injection (which relies heavily on reflection) increased the load time a measurable amount. When testing a form with hundreds of controls the test reported a 15% to 20% in load time. While this latency is not trivial, there are ways to improve the user experience in light of the extra load time. The built-in modular loading supports deferred and on-demand loading.

NOTE: Remember the 20% increase was on a form with 100's of controls. If you are building screens with over a hundred controls on them, perhaps the load time is the least of your worries?

How Does Prism Serve the Developer/Designer Workflow?

The patterns found in the Prism guidance truly separate the natural layers of the application by even aiming to have zero code in the code-behind! The presentation layer is decoupled for testing, but has the added benefit of being able to easily hand to a designer.

How Steep is the Learning Curve?

Some developers are facing an uphill battle when approaching Prism. If you are new to test driven development, the principals of separation-of-concerns, dependency injection and any other cool-kid buzzword that radiates from the ALT.NET movement, then Prism may seem like a huge undertaking.

If you do have exposure to the ALT.NET culture then you are most likely beginning to fold these practices into your development regimen already.

Resources

Composite WPF on CodePlex: Download the bits and the guidance
Composite WPF Contrib on CodePlex: This open source contrib effort will soon feature examples of how to use the eventing mechanism and modular loading features in a windows forms application written by Brian.
Design Patterns: The classic volume on object-oriented design patterns
Head First Design Patterns: Get the same content as the above book, but delivered in an irreverent, less academic format

5 Ways to Know If Your Software Sucks

craigshoemaker — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT

David Platt is an author, speaker and developer who wants you to recognize that there is a problem in software interface design. Fear not - David is not alone. Computer World recently reported that "the majority of end users (60 percent) find enterprise applications somewhat difficult, very difficult or almost impossible to use, hampering employee productivity." Yes – there’s sucky software out there and it just might be in your source code repository!

Does Your Software Suck?

I am sure David may have 5 or 10 or perhaps 20 ways you can know if your software sucks, but the following are 5 ways I gleaned from our conversation:

Did you design from the toolkit outward or the user inward? Perhaps you are a .NET or Ruby or Java wizard, but does your proficiency in these platforms punish end-users? There are dozens of features in any platform that if not managed carefully can result in frustrating user experiences.
Are colors, motion and other visual elements used "just because"? Designers like to design and coders like to code. Professionals are drawn to their practice often because a sense of passion and desire for a creative outlet. This can be a problem though when software features bells and whistles where elegance and proactive design is more appropriate.
Does the user have to memorize dozens of menu hierarchies or key commands? Balance is always a problem in user interface design. How do you accommodate newbies without frustrating the power-users? No one said there are easy answers, but with a little thought many features can become apparent at just the time of necessity.
Do you use your final product to test out new design paradigms? This may seem silly, because people don’t think of what they do in these terms. Often a new feature is included a new build that passed QA and got the nod from the three other developers in the room – all to prove to be too confusing or simply out-of-place to end users.
Do users have to think about using your program? When someone is using your software, if they spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about how to use the software rather than the problem the software is hoping to solve – then your software sucks.

What Should We Do?

David’s advice is provocative. Instead of gunning off a list of do’s and don’ts David suggests the following remedy to sucky software:

Allow software engineering to split off from computer science in formal education. Software engineering is much more than high performance algorithms and compiler design. Areas of specialty like user interface design and user experience require a different need of focus all the while being in a close-knit relationship with the discipline as a whole.
Software engineering needs specialization. As hinted above no-one in this day and age can claim to be an expert general practitioner programmer. There is simply too much to know. When "back-end" folks aren’t expected to produce the front-end – then we’ve made significant strides.

Books

My favorite quote from David is when he uses "reptilian midbrain" in a user interface explanation without breaking a sweat! ;)

Progress in User Interaction Design

While producing this show I found an interesting post on TechCrunch, Microsoft Researchers Get Fancy with a Sphere Display. Here is a video of the demonstration.

The "surface" appliances seem to be forging closer to the idea of having software that just works.

Popular Mechanics did a spot on the surface table. In this video you see how wireless devices interface with each other using the surface table as an intermediary. The best part? You can take a picture on your digital camera and load it on your cell phone: no cables, no syncing and no hassle!

The last video I have for you’re here is of the TouchWall. What I like best about this video is how they spend time explaining how the technology works.

7 Dos and Don'ts in Getting Started in User Centered Design

craigshoemaker — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:32:06 GMT

This week’s episode continues the series of user experience fundamentals with Dr. Tobias Komischke Director of User Experience at Infragistics. Tobias shares seven user-centered design concepts and the associated “dos” and “don’ts” with each point.

1: Orientation

Try to answer the three fundamental questions for every screen:
- Where am I?
- Where have I come from?
- What's next?
Employ UI patterns (often implemented by controls) to answer these questions
- Bread crumb and outlook bars do an excellent job of orienting a user

Don’t

Provide a blank context for a screen

2: Visual Attention

Group items that go together
Make important elements stick out using size and color
Use relative white space as a way to draw attention

Don’t

Give all visual elements the same “weight” in size and color
Use motion or animation unless you have a good reason to do so

3: Visual Structure and Flow

Think about how people consume visual information (often top to bottom and left to right)
Provide visual clues to guide users what to look at first, next and so on
Place controls that finalize actions at the end of the flow
Pay attention to consistent alignment
Try to adhere to established conventions

Don’t

Add components to a screen simply because there is space to fill
Place submit buttons at the top of a form - we’re looking at you, SharePoint :)
Require users add in un-necessary data

4: Scrolling & Paging

Employ paging when data is 3x or more larger than the available view area
Give ways for users to jump to specific pages when dealing with a lot of data

Don’t

Scroll horizontally unless you absolutely must
Scroll endlessly

5: Text

Vary font sizes to bring attention to important text
Choose font sizes that people can read

Don’t

Select text colors that are hard to read
Use text when it obstructs the meaning or a function of an operation – consider using an icon

6: Icons

Use icons to save screen real estate
Provide a legend to explain meaning of icons
Define tool tips to give context and meaning to icons

Don’t

Use icons to represent complicated concepts
Use icons inconsistently throughout the application

7: Graphs

Bar charts when possible
- Research indicates bar charts are easiest to interpret as the X axis doesn’t convey meaning relative to the value
Label chart scales
Use appropriate scale values

Don’t

Rely solely on ability of the user to interpret volumes
- For example, 3D pie charts may prove difficult to understand as volumes are difficult for users to rate

Reference Books

In the interview Tobias mentions a number of books that you may find useful when building data visualization screens:

8 Days, 1 Dev = MS Surface Minority Report Style in WPF

craigshoemaker — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Today we catch up with Rick Barraza, User Experience Architect for Cynergy Systems, where he shows us how with a little bit of creativity you can create some amazing experiences!

Harnessing Johhny Chung Lee's concepts for working with a Wii remote and using Brian Peek's DLL to expose the remote to .NET, Rick created Maestro.

Make sure to check out Rick's blog post where he demonstrates the code that makes Maestro happen.

Update: Smashing Magazine just listed Project Maestro as one of their 15 examples of cool gadgets!

ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements

craigshoemaker — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 will feature expanded snippets available in the HTML editor window. These snippets will dramatically change the way you write ASPX markup. For instance, if you were to add a TextBox to the page as soon as you begin typing <asp:TextBox... the snippet will take over and add in the ID and runat attribute.

Further, consider adding a RequiredFieldValidator to the page and the amount of work required in the past to properly configure the control. With the new snippets if you add a validator directly next to the TextBox you created previously, the snippet will automatically fill out the markup for the control, populating the ControlToValidate attribute, add the id and runat attributes and position your cursor inside the ErrorMessage attribute. Hand-coding has never been so easy!

Note: You’ll never have to type runat="server" again!

Further enhancements include the ability to triple-click an expansive element like a table and the editor selects the entire table’s markup. Want to surround that table with some additional markup? Just start typing with the table selected and your markup is inserted around the selected code.

ASP.NET Innovation

The ASP.NET platform has enjoyed a number of out-of-band updates in the form of AJAX, Dynamic Data and MVC, but the core of WebForms has remained without an update for a while. The reason is that the core of WebForms is dependent on System.Web, which is loaded by IIS.

This limitation has the attention of the ASP.NET team and in the future they are looking for ways to ship out-of-band releases on the core of WebForms. Until then we wait for the official release of ASP.NET 4.0 which will include the follow updates to WebForms:

Control of Control IDs: ASP.NET developers will finally have total control over the ClientID that is rendered to the page for each control. For simple scenarios you simply provide the ID value and in a data-bound context you can provide the key and replacement tag. For instance if you have a control in a data-bound control and you want the key to be "lbl" then the controls will have IDs consistent with lbl1, lbl2, lbl3 and so on.

Scott Galloway has an excellent post on the upcoming client ID changes: Way too much information on Control IDs and ASP.NET 4.0 Client Id Enhancements
Humble ViewState: Programming on the web often requires storing state somewhere. Using session state is prone to timeouts and can create problems in a server farm/garden environment. Many times the best place to persist data is in the HTML document itself. This logic is what drove the ASP.NET team to first implement ViewState, but an eager implementation (requiring parent controls to enable ViewState and other requirements) created bloated pages with unnecessary ViewState shoved up to the client.

The next generation of ViewState allows for granular control over which controls require ViewState. The default template for "4.0" project may even have ViewState turned off by default.
Dynamic Image Support: ASP.NET will feature rich image support giving developers an easy way to manipulate and maintain images on the web. Features include an image handler base class that is responsible for converting byte arrays to images and back again. A server control that calls the handler and helps pass parameters for uniquely identifying image data as well as stamping for cache support. The cache may be configured to cache on the server, the client or in both locations. Images are manipulated by a set of transforms which include resizing and watermarking among others.
IQueryable BusinessLogicDataSource: This new data source will feature query blocks which expose a declarative LINQ syntax to help create dynamic where clauses to append to search queries. The SearchExpression query block allows you to easily add "starts with", "ends with" and "contains" type of constraints to a query. The RangeExpression will read minimum and maximum values to constrain the range of a field. The LINQ syntax is generated when the page data binds sends the fully-constrained to the query to the server once all the parameters are known. Attributes associated with methods on the business logic layer will tell the data source which methods to run to select, insert, update and delete objects. The data source will work against a provider to interface with Linq to SQL, Linq to Enties, POCOs and more.

Dynamic Data

The Dynamic Data updates are spread among solutions for WebForms as well as MVC. Really the term "Dynamic Data" does injustice to the features as really they are becoming simply features of existing and new controls which are really just ASP.NET data controls.

For what you think of today as Dynamic Data, expect to see further work in the following areas:

Entity Templates: Much like a field template, but more of a container for markup and DynamicControls which can provide templating for an entire row of data rather than a single field.
Database Inheritance: Provide scaffold pages that will recognize database inheritance and provide CRUD capabilities for these tables.
Many to Many Relationships: Scaffolding will render check box lists to allow selection of many to many related data. (David Ebbo writes about this new feature in: A ‘Many To Many’ field template for Dynamic Data)

Use the Dynamic Control in a non-List Scenario?

The team is working on strategies for using the DynamicControl in situations where you are displaying a single record (and are outside the context of a list control).

Today a single record would bind to the FormView which supports the DynamicControl. Unfortunately FormView renders as a table in order provide places to hook in CSS classes. The FormView will soon feature a mode where you can turn off markup rendering all together so only the markup you provide is rendered.

There is talk among Scott and his team of the creation of an ItemView which may be a more natural fit for this type of scenario to compliment the ListView control.

Dyanmic Data & MVC

Out of respect of the culture surrounding MVC the team has chosen to implement Dynamic Data support backward to MVC. They began with adding HTML helpers and implementations for field/entity templates and databinding logic, leaving scaffolding for the end. This will ensure that Dynamic Data will work under MVC for those who choose to opt out of the scaffolding features.

In a seemingly controversial move, the team is implementing a version of ViewState for MVC! While the implementation details differ from traditional ViewState found in WebForms the technique of state persistence in a hidden HTML element will find its way to MVC.

In the interview, Scott poses the question of how one might implement optimistic concurrency in an MVC application. You may choose to implement a time stamp field or set aside the previous values for later comparison. If you choose to review old values then the state of this object must persist somewhere. So the team is looking to support developers who may choose a number of different approaches to the same problem.

Future Dynamic Data implementations for MVC will feature a controller with virtual methods for insert, update and delete. Using virtual methods obviously means that developers will have the option to over-ride and replace any methods they see fit.

Update: Check out Dynamic Data Preview 2

Resources

Microsoft Pre-release Software Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP
ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 Preview 1: Includes WebForms Dynamic Data futures and Dynamic Data/MVC blog sample
WebForms Updates
ASP.NET Codeplex Home
Dynamic Data Preview 2

ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta with Stephen Walther

craigshoemaker — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:02:47 GMT

Stephen Walther (@swalther) and Craig Shoemaker discuss the latest announcements surrounding the ASP.NET Ajax Library during PDC09.

A New Name a New Home

Now named ASP.NET AJAX Library (old name was proprietary)
First contribution to the CodePlex Foundation

What's New for the Beta?

OSS and inclusion in the CodePlex Foundation
Microsoft is providing product support even as the library remains OSS
Merging Ajax Control Toolkit (ACT) into the Ajax library

Unique Features

Client Script Loader - loads script dependencies in parallel
No installation necessary - use the CDN
Most ACT controls and functionality supported in client only scenario
ACT HTML editor not in beta, but look for it in RTM
Minifier functionality – includes command line tool and MS Build task
Preprocessor
Wiki for OSS documentation

Is jQuery Used Inside Ajax Controls?

No dependency on jQuery yet... leaving that up to developer needs

ASP.NET Simplicity and Performance with Scott Hunter

craigshoemaker — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:14:12 GMT

On this episode of Pixel8 Scott Hunter (@coolsch) joins us to discuss his team’s focus on simplicity and performance in ASP.NET. Scott was kind enough to surprise me with some talking points about what his team is thinking about for releases coming after ASP.NET 4! Please note, what’s discussed herein are un-implemented features of ASP.NET so your feedback is not only welcome, but encouraged!

Velocity Provider for Caching: This will allow developers to plug in caching scenarios based on their needs.
Automatic Generation of CSS Sprites: Adding images to the Content folder will trigger the ASP.NET framework to stitch together a single image which is later sliced up by inline styles. A helper method is responsible for generating markup of the appropriate CSS coordinates to wire-up the sprite. This feature will allow for groups so related images may be combined together.
Complex Helpers: There are scores of common features and functionality that many developers want to include in their applications, but unfortunately right now these features require a lot of code to implement. In the future you may have helpers available that provide a simple API to do the following:
- Resize images
- Watermark images
- Flip images
- Send Email - helpers for single method calls to send and mail or verify an address [ex: Email.Send() or Email.VerifyAddress()]
- Schedule Tasks - submit tasks to a background worker process (wouldn’t take down app domain if exception occurred)
- Posting status updates to Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Polls
- Ratings
- Comments
- OpenID integration
* Many of these features will likely be released outside the formal ASP.NET framework
Data Simplicity: Active record implementation that features a code-first approach. Consider a blank database with no tables. The active record pattern would allow you to instantiate the Foo class and then add values to Foo.Bar1 and Foo.Bar2, then call Foo.Save(). If the Foo table does not exist in the database, then the table is created and the data is persisted. Also Foo.All() would return all the records of Foo, but the return type is an IQueryable so you could further filter on the server. The code-first won’t be the only direction the integration will work. Changes in the database can be reflected in the model by use of T4 templates.

Note: I ask the requisite question about the virtues of the repository pattern as opposed to active record. Scott demonstrates how the implementation they are considering would not hinder you from exposing your own DTOs and wrapping a repository around the active record objects.

Also make sure you check out my post 12 Ways to Simplify ASP.NET and Visual Studio I wrote after being inspired by this interview!

Avoiding Ready-Fire-Aim UX Design

craigshoemaker — Thu, 29 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Adaptive Path’s Senior Interaction Designer Kim Lenox and Design Technologist Dan Harrelson share their experiences in how to think through the UX design process. Adaptive Path uses many tools to help guide their thinking like research-based design and injecting users directly in the design process.

Topics discussed in the show are:

Often we design features and functions. We should design for unmet needs and pain points
Extreme Programming discipline of having a user as a part of the team is very useful
Getting rid of the "you had to be there" problem
Common areas where people stop short in UX design
- Willingness to have a bad UX, because it's too difficult
Areas to pay special attention
- User interface
- Performance
- Error handling
- Not breaking out of the "framework" box

Resources

UX in the Wild : Advertisting Done Right

I came across this Dice/Dilbert widget that caught my attention. This is how you get people to notice your advertisting!

TechEd Developer 2008

I am making final preparations for TechEd. We will be recording at booth number 1208. Here's a sample of some of the people we'll be chatting with:

Dave Platt
Kate Gregory
Steve Smith
Ted Neward
Udi Dahan
Pete LePage

If you want to come by and ask questions or be involved in the interviews, feel free!

Brad Abrams: .NET Yesterday & Today

craigshoemaker — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager for UI Framework and Services, sits down with Craig Shoemaker to discuss some of the origins of the .NET Framework and what's to come from Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET AJAX.

Brad also gives us some insight into the inspiration of his Software Development Predictions for 2008.

Coining "Ajax" and Seeing the Future

craigshoemaker — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Craig Shoemaker talks with co-founder and president of Adaptive Path Jesse James Garrett about his experiences in creating the Elements of User Experience, the Visual Vocabulary and coining the term "Ajax".

Jesse and his team have worked with some of the most recognizable properties on the web. Companies such as Flickr, Blogger, BitTorrent, Microsoft and Intel have all leaned on Adaptive Path’s strength in crafting user interaction.

While many recent innovations have largely surrounded advancements in software, Jesse tells us about Adaptive Path’s curiosity into the new hardware that's making waves in computing to take user experiences to the next level.

Resources

Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications - the whitepaper that ushered in the Ajax craze
Visual Vocabulary for Information Architecture

Read Jesse's book, "The Elements of User Experience":

Phillips Ambient window

During the show we talk about some of the advances in hardware and the impact we see in the market in light of these changes. Below is a demonstration of the Phillips "ambient window" that gives you total control to the light mood of a room. The below video is just under 4 minutes long and worth every second of your time.

Congratulations!

First of all, congrats to Infragistics' own Devin & Kathleen Rader who recently welcomed baby boy Kyle Rader to the family! We all wish you the best and hope you enjoy every moment with your new baby.

To make life even sweeter, Devin's book was selling at the #5 spot this week out of all the books sold at Amazon.com!

Here's a screen shot of the Amazon.com Top 100 Books taken on the afternoon of May 6th (the list is updated hourly).

Way to go Bill, Scott and Devin!

Thanks to Jason Beres for the image.

Announcements

We recently released TestAdvantage for Windows Forms (for IBM Rational Functional Tester).
Check out our Silverlight 2.0 line-of-business application: faceOut. There aren't many real-world SL 2.0 LOB apps out there right now you know ;)

Creating Immersive Silverlight Video Experiences

craigshoemaker — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

The web was a-buzz after MIX this year with the strong commitment the Olympic Games is making to Silverlight. The team demonstrated a stunning system that will perhaps for the first time make television on over the internet and on the computer not only a viable option, but a compelling alternative.

But the Olympics solution isn’t the only game in town…

Peter Matuchniak from Technicolor takes us on a tour of the new system they are working on for satellite cable networks to stream live video to the web via Silverlight.

The experience isn't just high-quality video in your web browser. Peter and his team of designers have developed some engaging UI features that keep viewers involved in the selected stream as well as aspects of immersive programming, community involvement, impulse shopping and new monetization outlets.

You can watch the interview by starting the video in the player above, or you can listen to or download the audio version of the show below:

- download -

CSS-like Control Over Windows Forms

craigshoemaker — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Ever wanted CSS-like control over your existing Windows Forms applications? Grant Hinkson, Director of Visual Design at Infragistics, shows us how it's possible with AppStylist.

Data Visualization in the Wild: Chart Analysis with Dr. Tobias Komischke

craigshoemaker — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:13:23 GMT

Tobias Komischke explains how paying attention to data visualization nuances can make a big difference in how data is percieved. Make sure you check out Tobias' blog post on User-Centered Data Visualization. Part 1 which discusses this topic further.

Duration: 7:39

Developer’s Guide to User Experience Design

craigshoemaker — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Michael Mahemoff has a background in computer science and psychology earning a PhD in building pattern languages. Michael is best known for his book, Ajax Design Patterns, where he catalogs 34 patterns commonly found in Ajax applications. Michael’s further work with pattern languages define patterns found in safety-critical systems.

Being a User Experience Designer

Some programmers may get hung up on not being able to design for user experience because they feel they are not artistic enough. In fact, user experience is much more than the user interface.

*** Berry postulates in his article The User Experience that the elements of an application fall along the following lines:

User interface: 10%
Human/computer dialog (work flow): 30%
System functions: 60 %

Real-World Usability Studies

When trying to figure out how to best design for your users, Mahemoff suggests that developers and designers become “software anthropologists”. Rather than simply asking individuals what they want from a system, you can learn much more by simply watching people do their job.

In a real-world application of this approach Mahemoff helped move from a system where user micro-managed data to where their interaction with the system is more likened to “steering a ship”.

These changes came from a series of observation sessions where Michael sat with the users at varied times to try and get a comprehensive sense of the problems they were trying to solve. The key to his research was being with his subjects at varied times. This allowed him to see the permutations of the business process against critical events in the workflow.

What Do You Look For?

When designing a system there are a number of questions that may not be obvious to developers who are concerned with “heads down coding”. Gain perspective of the business domain by considering the following:

What pressures from management, peers or culture may affect the workflow?
How often do people take breaks? What happens after they return?
How do people and the business react during critical workflow events?

How Do You Keep Your Subjects Honest?

Hawthorne effect suggests that people may change their behavior while being observed. So how do you conduct un-biased your research?

Observe for a long period of time
Be explicit of your reasons for observing
Don’t overbearing – sit back and watch

Dr. WPF's Prescription for Windows Presentation Foundation

craigshoemaker — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

This week we talk with WPF guru, Dr. WPF. The good Dr. delivers his insights on common misunderstandings in WPF along with a recommendation on one of the most important decisions you can make when building your applications. He also tells us about what he sees as being a true barrier for rapid WPF adoption. Remember though it's easy to get the answers you need... all you have to do is ask Dr. WPF!

Resources

Ask Dr. WPF: send him an email or visit his website
Read the ItemsControl A to Z series
Learn about MVPoo
Intro to Model-View-View-Model

What’s Happening in .NET

Scott Guthrie recently blogged about the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 beta release. While shipping with the expected bug fixes, SP1 comes with some major feature additions as well. The following is a quick list of the items that affect user experience:

Dynamic Data: Makes working with data-driven websites a delight. This release brings DynamicControl support to GridView, ListView, DetailsView and FormView
Routing: Yes, the URL does matter! The routing engine brings control to URL to all ASP.NET developers.
Back/Forward History: This control will help solve a significant user experience problem plaguing AJAX applications
Script Combining: Many AJAX applications will get a performance boost when multiple JavaScript files are consolidated on the server and served to the client at once.
JavaScript Code Formatting: Visual Studio makes your life a little bit easier when writing JavaScript as the code formatting engine now works with JavaScript.
IntelliSense for JavaScript AJAX Frameworks: There are a number of great JavaScript libraries out there. Visual Studio now has IntelliSense support for most of the major players.

Pixel8

4 Elements of Professional WPF Applications

Composite Application Guidance for WPF: Prism Goes Prime Time

What is Prism?

Prism is:

What is a composite application?

Where Did Prism Come From?

What Are the Basic Elements of Prism?

What About Performance?

How Does Prism Serve the Developer/Designer Workflow?

How Steep is the Learning Curve?

Resources

5 Ways to Know If Your Software Sucks

Does Your Software Suck?

What Should We Do?

Links

Books

Progress in User Interaction Design

7 Dos and Don'ts in Getting Started in User Centered Design

1: Orientation

2: Visual Attention

3: Visual Structure and Flow

4: Scrolling & Paging

5: Text

6: Icons

7: Graphs

Reference Books

8 Days, 1 Dev = MS Surface *Minority Report* Style in WPF

ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements

Visual Studio 2010

ASP.NET Innovation

Dynamic Data

Use the Dynamic Control in a non-List Scenario?

Dyanmic Data & MVC

Resources

ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta with Stephen Walther

A New Name a New Home

What's New for the Beta?

Unique Features

Is jQuery Used Inside Ajax Controls?

ASP.NET Simplicity and Performance with Scott Hunter

Avoiding Ready-Fire-Aim UX Design

Resources

UX in the Wild : Advertisting Done Right

TechEd Developer 2008

Brad Abrams: .NET Yesterday & Today

Coining "Ajax" and Seeing the Future

Resources

Phillips Ambient window

Congratulations!

Announcements

Creating Immersive Silverlight Video Experiences

CSS-like Control Over Windows Forms

Data Visualization in the Wild: Chart Analysis with Dr. Tobias Komischke

Developer’s Guide to User Experience Design

Being a User Experience Designer

Real-World Usability Studies

What Do You Look For?

How Do You Keep Your Subjects Honest?

Dr. WPF's Prescription for Windows Presentation Foundation

Resources

What’s Happening in .NET

8 Days, 1 Dev = MS Surface Minority Report Style in WPF