More Links of Personal (and Technical) Interest
Jensen Harris of the Office 12 Team Talks UI
It is novel to read about developers talking openly about user interface design—especially Microsoft developers. In “New Rectangles to the Rescue?,” Jensen is not concerned about minimizing and dismissing UI limitations in previous versions of Office. Jensen writes:
As I have discussed before, by Office 2000, menus and toolbars were essentially full. Each additional item that we added was such a small percentage of the overall structure that people didn’t even notice new commands from version to version. The relatively poor organization of the menu structure didn’t help. So, when Adaptive Menus failed to catch on, Office had a problem—people weren’t finding and using the new features.
It should have been front page Google™ news with a headline like “Microsoft Office Toolbars Full” revealing what was non-consciously obvious to me. I appreciate Jensen for waking me up about the woodpile of Toolbars, the deep stacking of Task Panes—of which demos from the InfoPath team show little concern—and, of course, why “Clippy” is so annoying.
IanG Tapping on the Next Version of C#…
In “C# 3.0—Var Isn’t Object,” Ian Griffith is essentially introducing us to “inferred types”—a term mentioned at least twice in passing by Anders Hejlsberg during his LINQ presentation on Channel9.
Okay! I don’t think C# can do this…
Java users enjoy the ability to compile XSL style sheets into Java classes. No smart-ass remarks following.
C# and Java Need this…
http://www.preemptive.com/ sells obfuscators for Java and C#. These are needed because tools like Reflector can read the contents of C# assemblies like Notepad opens a text file. The high prices at preemptive.com inform me that only the relatively cash/credit-rich developers can enjoy making competitor-free code. Ah, this is how the rich get richer… By the way, the “community edition” of Dotfuscator is no match for my mouse clicks in Reflector.
Ubuntu Configuration
“How To—Configure Ubuntu for Microsoft Virtual PC 2004” kind of helped but one of the Linux guys around my cube really got it working…
Scott Guthrie and PHP-style Hacks
In “App_Offline.htm,” Scott is pleased to report using a ‘special’ file name to make ASP.NET or IIS do stuff. It reminds me of PHP-style magic tricks where some function somewhere does something—all you need to know is the ‘special’ name of the function… So ASP.NET 2.0 has ‘reserved’ HTML file names—a slippery slope?