Silverlight and Google searches
Posted on October 15th, 2008
Well unless you’ve been living under a rock you’d know that Silverlight 2.0 has now been released. Why do you care? … Assuming the rock you were under wasn’t too big :) you’d know that the first release of Silverlight was really intended for designers and not developers although, there was technically nothing stopping you from creating anything you wanted. It was just extremely painful. Think pencil in ear.
Silverlight 2.0 brings all the goodies that we’ve come to expect as good little Microsoft developers. We have better looking user controls, layout controls and a host of 3rd party controls from companies like Telerik and ComponentArt.
And so the great move to Silverlight begins, anyone that has any half decent web application is going to want it redone in Silverlight and most new projects will want to take advantage of the hype around this technology. Please note (pretty please?) I don’t really like the word “hype” since the technology truly is amazing .. anyway with the CYA out the way I too started on a new design for some of my own products.
One of these is my Mafooku shared store system. This site, like many, requires that Google can do a good job searching for content since there are thousands of products for sale. Then it hit me. How is Google going to search my content when it’s embedded in a control … I’m sure many of you are already shouting – but just emit the same content and hide it … nah, not really practical on many sites and a waste of bandwidth.
You probably hoping there is some great solution – nah … nothing yet. I’m thinking there needs to be some interface added for search engines to find the exact content you’re displaying but I am unaware of anything as yet. I’m not saying there isn’t :) I just haven’t found it yet.
I did want to share a link to a short blog post about a transform you can add, that a search engine can use to get a form of rendered and readable content which can be searched.
It did also just occur to me that creating external links like
http://somelink/?id=x
need a way to be interpreted by the Silverlight application so that the correct content can be displayed … fun :) I’m sure it will be easy but definitely a new way of doing things.
It is the best of Flash, Smart clients and the web all in one. I hope you’re going to get learning too! Nobody needs another html web site :)
ps: Dear Google, please make me a Silverlight Adsense control :)
Tags: google, siliverlight
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Gadget Features!
Posted on August 15th, 2008
I’ve thrown up a new site over the last week. It’s sole purpose is to track and gather information on the features we all really really need for our gadgets, phones and even operating systems.
Anybody can post a feature idea and can request for products to be added to the site.
Take a look and get voting! What Feature?
Yes, the site is called What Feature … do you know how hard it is to find a good domain name these days ;) I thought I did a fairly good job with that one.
Tags: whatfeature php
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Oh come on Microsoft ….
Posted on July 31st, 2008
Anybody take a guess what application this is?
I hope you’re laughing, for anybody running Office 2007 – probably the most bug riddled release ever from MS. This is supposed to be my outlook. Besides suddenly and continuously prompting me to login to our freaking exchange server I get this window – maybe they can repackage this as Micro-Outlook for the iPhone maybe? ;)
At my office we’ve also noticed that all Vista and Office 2007 machines that have Visio installed get a nasty bug that crashes Visio every single time it exits even after a OLE sequence.
I hear bells in my head :)
Tags: bad software, microsoft
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Why Vista still Sux
Posted on June 12th, 2008
I hate to sound like I’m just jumping on the band wagon with another Vista rant, the Internet already has enough of those :) but this is just one of those damn stupid things that I just can’t let go, simply because every time I try use my camera I get the dreaded driver disk screen.
Once you’ve been using Vista for awhile you’ll find a few gems that’ll make you want to just stick it out but man, after almost 2 years you would think it was better than this.
So here is the low down. I have a Pentax A20 digital camera – nothing unusual there. Ever since I switched to Vista I’ve been able to just plug my camera in via USB and copy off my images, even using Vista’s new image manager. This camera has no drivers – non were ever made since it uses a generic drive. (SD Chip) – Well last week I plug my camera in and whamo … now Vista says it needs drivers for a device that has NO freaking drivers. No way around it, no fix, no drivers to download – Vista just lost the freaking plot and now I have to take out the SD chip each time I want my pics….
Bravo MS bravo …
Tags: Vista
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Duck-typing is great! but also bad.
Posted on April 21st, 2008
I haven’t yet posted my work on PHP so this is a little out of context however since it applies to many popular languages I’m just going to go ahead and post :)
Here is a brief description of what duck typing is – basically slang but a very nice feature of various programming languages. I personally like it and I suspect most others do simply because it saves key strokes, after almost 10 years of c# programming you get very tired of double declarations.
So I have recently been doing a lot of work with PHP and discovered a disadvantage of duck typing. Although the compiler and runtime environment may know what type a variable is, you as a programmer might not! This might not seem like a big problem if you wrote the entire program but if you’re working with someone elses code or writing plugins/modules for existing systems, you’ll find this kinda hard. If you see a variable called $params being passed into a function you could “guess” it is an array but it might be some custom class.
I use a nice PHP IDE (phpEd) and real debugger so I can get the information quickly if I want but still, it raised yet another issue in trying to understand what code is trying to do.
-c
Tags: duck typing, php
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I present, “Linq Alias Generator”
Posted on January 22nd, 2008
Here is a small project I thought others might find as useful as I have. We all know how hard it is to find a decently written schema these days especially when you inherit a project. Well why carry those ugly column names into code? This generator will create nice names for your columns while preserving the actual column name in the Linq To SQL dbml files.
This is an initial release so better things to come but it works for now. If you’d like to get involved there is a dedicated page here and a codeplex project as well.
Download from http://www.codeplex.com/linqalias/
Keep track of changes on my blog page here http://www.typemismatch.com/linq-alias/
Enjoy, -c
Tags: .NET, Tools, VS 2008
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Tools are the next programming paradigm …
Posted on November 25th, 2007
“Code Generation” tools to be more specific. Let me clarify that firstly. I’m not talking about tools that just take away programmer’s jobs – I don’t see anything that would suggest that is currently possible. I’m more interested in tools that just do what we keep repeating. If you haven’t discovered code productivity tools yet then you’ve been living under a rock! It’s time to wake up and get busy. You’re too slow these days without some good tools and so I’ve put a few posts together just for the best tools you could start with.
If you browse around the net these days you’ll find tons of “silver bullets” for the programming problems of today. Time is usually the best test of these things and pretty much all fancy styles, methodologies or techniques have failed or fail to some degree. The bottom line is, there isn’t a magic way to develop software, that will at least guarantee good quality or bug less code. So I think the next best thing is – how do we developer faster? and if we do find something that works well, how can I automate that so the next time I use it, a. I don’t have to rewrite it and b. I don’t re-create any bugs.
As a developer if you can build a library of tools, snippets and templates you’ll definately be headed down the road to more successful software. Now not all my suggestions are for code generation – I’ll talk a little about profilers and other such tools you just have to have!
http://www.typemismatch.com/2007/11/25/tools-productivity-tools-generators/
http://www.typemismatch.com/2007/11/24/tools-net-profilers/
If you do have any tool recommendations please leave a comment and I can see about adding a post for them.
-c
Tags: .NET, Tools
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Tools: Productivity Tools / Generators
Posted on November 25th, 2007
There are many tools out there for developers and I’ll probably write some more later about some ORM tools I use often and that save a ton of time. This article is about a more generic tool, something that can help you no matter what kind of code you’re writing. These are productivity tools and/or code generators.
A good tool in this area does at least the following:
- Helps identify code mistakes
- Supports code block templates
- Lots of refactoring support
- A good deal of syntax high lighting, i.e. code blocks, braces, line numbers etc.
Again this isn’t a tool you’re going to find for free. They take a great deal of time and research to develop so be prepared to spend a little. I’d say anything priced from $150-$250 is about average.
Below I have listed two tools both from the same company. The first called “Refactor!Pro” is a great tool however it is included in the more advanced product called “CodeRush” both from DevExpress.
Although Refactor!Pro is only $99 it is well worth the extra $150 to get the full product. This tool is incredible and you’ll discover even in the first day of usage that it can save you a ton of time. The ability to create your own templates which change depending on the code you’re editing is awesome. I picked this over competitive products primarily for 1. Their support and other product lines and 2. Their integration with the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts was just the easiest to use.
Don’t forget, you must learn to use these tools. If you get one and don’t bother to learn the shortcuts or how the templates work then you’re just wasting your money. See some juicy screen shots belows.
As usual you can get a nice long trial, so give it a go!
-c
Tags: .NET, Tools
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Tools: .NET Profilers
Posted on November 24th, 2007
This post is part of my series on development tools. There are way to many companies out there that do not offer their developers any tools what-so-ever and it is a real shame. If you’re a lone ranger then you need to get some cash and get these tools.
If you want to write high performance applications there are many things to consider and I’m not going to get into all the design aspects now. What I want to stress is that as human beings we just don’t have the capacity to predict everything our software is going to do when it runs. Using a profiler allows you to see exactly how your code is running and for web applications you can get a great idea where to optimize and also where to add caching.
Unfortunately there are no good free .NET code profilers out there but hey, very seldom is truely useful software just free :) The JetBrains and Red-Gate profilers are your best bet. I found the Ants profiler from Red-Gate to be the easiest to use and understand the output. Although JB’s profiler looks better, I went with more functional. The guys at RG are also easy to negotiate with so go bargin yourself a good price!
Here is the link for the Ants profiler, go give it a whirl. Screen shot below:
-c
Tags: .NET, Tools
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Simple programming can be hard but it’s worth it.
Posted on November 11th, 2007
I recently launched a new site off some old ideas I had. I decided that I didn’t have the time to engineer yet other typical site with logins, account management, features, features, features etc. I wanted to keep the barriers to usage extremely low – since my site was going to be radically different, why lets users leave because your site wasn’t fast enough. I guess this is more about a simple site rather than simple code – which is a whole other story!
This is a short study on what took to build Mafooku and what appears simple sometimes isn’t. Take a look at the site for reference: Mafooku – Top 10
I started off the usual way, lets get the basics done for any site. So here was the initial list of things I thought my site needed. I’ve broken each section down into the initial “bad” list and then the final “good” list.
- We’re posting products so we’re going to need an login to edit products.
- If you need a login you need registration.
- Now I needed password/account recovering pages.
- Product edit/save page.
Woah … look at that list. To post a single product the user must first register, remember yet “another” username and password, understand their account layout and finally try post a product. Many users would have given up already so I narrowed down the list to just
- Let the user post a product.
A single page, short sweet with limited fields and just one image. Everything you need to get a seller interested in your products. So that may have seemed easy enough but we have a problem now. How does a user edit or re-post a product or more importantly delete it if it isn’t relevant anymore?
You need some creative thinking for this. A user can remove their product because when it is posted they get an email with an encrypted link to disable the product. Since only they have that email it acts like an account. The same idea applies to editing or in my case – just re-posting with updated details.
So from my initial list, item 3 wasn’t ever needed. Item 4 was really just item 1 simplified for the user so no extra coding here. Item 2 again wasn’t needed. There are now no barriers to usage, the site will be faster and much easier to understand.
I applied the same to the actual product listings. Categories etc just get too big for users to really navigate and search, when done right, can help a lot – is it really simple? I decided for this site, no. If you can’t see what we have within 1 click (no typing!) then it isn’t simple enough. Hence the front page items and a list of the last 100 and nothing else.
The actually programming behind the scenes was a bit more complex with some advanced caching, plenty of security and encryption but still remained a small size code base because I never stuffed the site with un-needed features.
-c
Tags: .NET, architecture, programming
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