Design Sense : ASP.NET New Website Design

A few days back I stumbled upon Scott Hanselman's blog post about the availability of new Beta ASP.NET website. I hated ASP.NET website for a long time and even complained a bit earlier. My biggest complaint was about the lack of RSS Feeds with Video files as enclosures. There is no easy way to get updates on new videos and watch and/or download from any RSS feed reader. (Hated it so much that during one of our training classes, I built a web crawler to create RSS Feeds with enclosures and in a later session, built a web application that will let anybody create a RSS feed from resources any where on the web).  And then, I haven't visited the site a for a long time. So, I was eager to check it out and did it at last.

 

On a related note, there were many properties, particularly around Microsoft, did not offer such RSS feeds with enclosures. I complained about MIX and PDC 2010 some time back. I think they offered RSS Feeds later on for some of those. I was particularly taken aback when I saw this note on MIX site.

If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download MIX10Downloader.zip (1.39KB) and extract the MIX10Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start MIX10Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PPTX. Then wait. For files that aren’t available, cURL will download a file that is around 1,245 bytes in size (if you change the extension to .htm and open it, you’ll see that the file is simply an HTML "not found" error page).

To rename the files, first, download MIX10Renamer.zip (4.09KB). Then, extract the MIX10Renamer.bat file to the folder that contains your downloaded files, and from a command prompt, type MIX10Renamer WMV to rename all of the .WMV files to the full session title. By changing the parameter, you can also rename your PPTX and MP4 files.

Anyways, here is what I thought when I looked around the new (still beta) asp.net website. I am not a designer and currently learning about interaction design on web applications. So take my comments with a pinch of salt.

As highlighted in Scott's blog, information has been re-positioned quite wonderfully in the 'Learn' pages of the site. Oh, no, you will not find a link to 'Learn' on the front page. Click on any topic links on the top (say Web Forms). Nice and clean grouping of content organization into tabs, chapter menu and quite a clean list. Pluralsight videos have been featured as 'Essentials', rightly so.

Just one quirk though. I kept clicking on each of those tabs to view the content in each section. But once I hit 'Forum', suddenly I felt like totally lost the context.  No more header, no more tabs. It totally feels out of place. The only way, you can comeback to context was to use the back button. It should have been a link rather than a tab. Semantically, I expect the content to be opened within the tab, preserving the tab position in the tab group.

Community Page is also organized quite cleanly with variety of content from the community eco system. Floating navigation bar at the left deserves to be mentioned too.

Other than that, I did not find any thing impressive. But here are some more thoughts on how it could be done better.

Front page is Wasted

Copywriting is quite essential for any web application. If somebody new visits the page, there is not much to take away from the page. Leave alone, impress the user to explore further. The front page totally fails in this aspect. There is no conversation started and no conversation to continue. This is the least expected of a Web development community.

 

If somebody visits the front page, the first question that should have been answered is what is ASP.NET is all about and why it is worth exploring.

This is what ASP.NET site looks like. Visit the page and Try to answer the question, What is ASP.NET?

Compare it to RoR (Ruby on Rails). View the following snapshot or Visit the page and try to answer what is RoR?

Or Compare it to jQuery. View the snapshot or visit the page and then try to answer what is jQuery?

If you are not convinced, visit the front page of ASP.NET site, visit Ruby On Rails Front page and Visit the jQuery front page. Quite obvious. Isn't it?

I think the front page is totally wasted. I do expect a much seriously higher bounce rate from the top page than any other page.

Why Community Spotlight so important wide, front and loud on the front page? And two large banner ads to go with it? I don't understand why Microsoft has to resort to dumping so many ads on the community site.

A little test of Usability and Information

Have a friend of yours that doesn't know anything about ASP.NET and visit the site and see what he/she can say about ASP.NET. Try the same with jQuery, Ruby on Rails or any other site for that matter and see what they can gather. I did. I tried with two friends who have been working in a Telecom industry for about 10 years and haven't heard of any of these : ASP.NET, RoR and jQuery.  Now they are obsessed with RoR and jQuery in that order, but couldn't scratch the surface yet when it comes to ASP.NET.

And lastly, ASP.NET still doesn't seem to have RSS Feeds with enclosures. It seems, they have lot more interest in eye balls rather and still care so much about advertisers.

Shortage of .NET Developers

I have been telling all this year that we couldn't find good .NET Developers. It appears, its an industry wide trend across the US.

According to technology job board Dice’s October report, there’s one particular tech talent now in short supply across the U.S.: Microsoft’s .NET. Job postings requiring .NET are up more than 25% year-over-year, the company says – faster growth than the total job postings on all of Dice.com. -- Techcrunch 

Looking for a job, make your search faster here.

PDC Keynote : The Opportunity of Win32 (1992)

If  you have some time to kill this weekend, watch the PDC Keynote from 1991 by Bill Gates talking about the huge opportunity for Software Development community with Win32.

You can in fact watch all PDC Keynotes from the PDC archives at Channel 9. Its nice to walk down the memory lane and see how the current Microsoft stack evolved from early 90s to what we have today.

Microsoft MIX : Why can’t they offer RSS Feed instead?

I don’t know why? Majority of conferences organized by and around Microsoft Technologies, DO NOT offer RSS Feeds of their sessions and videos. For some mysterious reasons. Instead the sites offer a ridiculously tedious and stupid interface to subscribe/download session videos.

It is supposedly a conference of UX Experts.

“MIX is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web.” - http://live.visitmix.com/

But when you want to watch or download session videos, there is NO RSS FEED. Instead here is what they want you to do:

If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download MIX10Downloader.zip (1.39KB) and extract the MIX10Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start MIX10Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PPTX. Then wait. For files that aren’t available, cURL will download a file that is around 1,245 bytes in size (if you change the extension to .htm and open it, you’ll see that the file is simply an HTML "not found" error page).

To rename the files, first, download MIX10Renamer.zip (4.09KB). Then, extract the MIX10Renamer.bat file to the folder that contains your downloaded files, and from a command prompt, type MIX10Renamer WMV to rename all of the .WMV files to the full session title. By changing the parameter, you can also rename your PPTX and MP4 files.

Majority of people that are interested in these sessions, I believe, would have one or other RSS Feed Reader applications. If they provide an RSS FEED, everybody can easily and readily view all sessions and download if they want to.

What kind of an UX is this?

Two Microsoft .NET Developer Events in DFW, You Must Attend

If you are a budding .NET developer looking to kick start your career in 2011 or advance your career on Microsoft .NET technologies, here are two great events right here in DFW that you must attend.

Windows Azure 2 Day BootCamp : 16th and 17th February 2011

This is a 2-day deep dive program to prepare you to deliver solutions on the Windows Azure Platform. We have worked to bring the region’s best Azure experts together to teach you how to work in the cloud. Each day will be filled with training, discussion, reviewing real scenarios, and hands on labs.

More Details and Registration here.

Dallas Day of Dot Net : 4th and 5th of March 2011

With Phil Haack kicking off the 2 day event with ASP.NET MVC 3, it got 2 days of immersive .NET programs including but not limited to “Windows phone, Azure, C# 4.0, HTML 5, Asp.Net MVC 3, WPF, Silverlight”. The event is priced at $200, but all proceeds go towards helping a cancer patient.

More Details and Registration here.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Gandhi

Dallas : Two Days of Immersive .NET Training

Two days of totally immersive hands-on .NET  training.

Three tracks to fit your profile.

Right here in DFW. ( @Microsoft Campus, Irving TX)

All for $125.

$50 Early bird discount if you signup before 7th Dec, 2010. ( Use Coupon Code: JeffreyPalermo )

Visit the first ever Dallas Day Of Dot Net for more details.

Microsoft PDC 2010 : Video RSS Feeds

Microsoft’s Developer eco-system is arguably one of the best and probably lot more active than others out there. And the eco-system produces tons of multi-media content. But I always cringe when I don’t see an RSS Feed with Media Enclosures that users can readily subscribe and watch or download instantly.  Its always left to somebody to help us out.

PDC 2010 web site is a nice Silverlight application.  And absolutely no HTML fall back incase somebody doesn’t have a Silverlight plugin installed.  And of course, no RSS Feed (yet) as usual.

Thanks a ton to Greg Duncan for providing a full list of Videos (with all formats available) and associated RSS Feeds that you can readily subscribe.  Visit his blog post and access either the individual list or RSS Feeds of your favorite formats here. 

If you want to watch those Videos on your iPad or iPhone, try MP4(low) format.

Active Player

If you don’t have a Media Player or Application that can consume those RSS Feeds and instantly playback, take a look at Active Player.  Not only it help you subscribe to RSS Feeds, it also let you take notes, bookmark those videos or even create clips of those videos for sharing or review later.  Here is a snapshot of the Active Player playing a Video from PDC2010 feed.

Active Feeds : Create an RSS Feed of your Favorite Videos

I built a small Google App Engine app, called Active Feeds recently to create your own RSS Feed from videos from anywhere on the web and share with the world. I quickly built a set of RSS Feeds for Videos available at ASP.NET to demonstrate.  Next time, if you want to create an RSS Feed with your favorite Videos, check it out. The application needs lots of work to make it more user friendly but as of now is fully functional to use.

Free E-Book : Programming Windows Phone 7

If you are tinkering on developing .NET Applications on Windows Mobile 7, here is a free eBook from Microsoft Press by Charles Petzold, that can get you started.  The book is available in PDF and XPS formats.

Some more free e-Books for .NET Developers moving to VS 2010 here.

Windows Live Writer Goes Office Style

Just noticed that with Windows Live Essentials 2011 upgrade, Windows Live Writer also gets Ribbon style interface that became so famous and productive with MS Office applications.

If you have been using WLW for a while but haven’t used any MS Office applications that feature ribbon style interface, you are in for a big surprise and little bit of confusion. 

If you are looking for all your Picture effects, they are split into two different sections: borders and effects. Click on Image to make these Picture tools/Format section visible.

Microsoft Office Advertisement in 1990

Wow, its almost 20 years, since the first MS Office suite was released back in 1990 with three applications. Office 2010 is absolutely lot more visually pleasing and equally lot more productive now.  Found this Advertisement that ran in Info World in the 19th November (1990) edition while reading on Wikipedia.



Source: Page 50, Info World, 19th November 1990 via Google Books

Of all software applications I worked on, MS Excel is still the application I love the most for its power, functionality and brutal simplicity.  Outlook is still the most used application and its new feature Social connectors looks awesome.

Exploring .NET Framework : What you can do with .NET?

If you are wondering what you can do with .NET, check this out. Its a beautifully designed Silverlight application that provide an overview of full stack of technologies and frameworks for .NET development.

ASP.NET Security Vulnerability And A Work-around

Microsoft issued a security Advisory about a vulnerability in ASP.NET :

Microsoft is investigating a new public report of a vulnerability in ASP.NET. An attacker who exploited this vulnerability could view data, such as the View State, which was encrypted by the target server, or read data from files on the target server, such as web.config. This would allow the attacker to tamper with the contents of the data. By sending back the altered contents to an affected server, the attacker could observe the error codes returned by the server. We are not aware of attacks that try to use the reported vulnerabilities or of customer impact at this time.  

-- Microsoft Security Advisory (2416728)

While the issue is still being investigated, Scott Gu offers a workaround that could help prevent hackers succeed in using the loophole. The work around is to hide specific/detailed error code information to the user and instead display a generic error page.

The blog post also offers a script that you can run on your web sever to identify all applications that need to be patched.  Take a look and patch your applications ASAP.

Hotmail is Better/Faster in Safari on Mac ??

Just watched Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" on Active Player.

Source : Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" from O'Reilly Velocity Conference ( Feed ) via Active Player

It is totally surprising to see that Hotmail is actually better/faster in Safari browser on the Mac than any browser/OS.

( Source : PPT )

Cowboys To Craftsmen with ASP.NET MVC ??

Quite an interesting way to put the Journey of ASP.NET (developers) from ASP.NET Page based design to MVC based applications. Hope I am not taking it out of context. Its not explicit, but it is written all over the wall. Nevertheless, towers of abstraction and magic by Visual Studio often make developers ignore the inner workings of the framework. Its not a surprise to find an ASP.NET developer that hardly knows anything about HTML beyond the acronym and yet can still develop great ASP.NET pages that really work.

Undoubtedly ASP.NET MVC is better than ASP.NET Web forms, particularly in terms of testability and separation of concerns. But I do not think the model (be it MVC or Web forms) itself could create a better developer somehow.

There are two ways to be a developer. You can be a cowboy or you can be a craftsman. A cowboy jumps right in and starts coding. A cowboy can build a software application quickly. The problem with being a cowboy is that software must be maintained over time.

A craftsman is patient. A craftsman builds software carefully by hand. A craftsman is careful to build unit tests that cover all the code in an application. It takes longer for a craftsman to create an application. However, after the application is created, it is easier to fix bugs in the application and add new features to the application.

Most software developers start their programming careers as cowboys. At some point, however, you must hang up your saddle and start building software that will stand the test of time.

Source : Stephen Walther on ASP.NET MVC

You can see the focus and so much stress on ‘hand crafting’.  I guess even ASP.NET is going through a journey of its own. by moving away from it’s Page based model and embracing MVC that the rest of the world has been using for years.

ASP.NET Vs Ruby On Rails (RoR) : Now You Know ASP.NET MVC

Listen to this wonderful conversation between Scott Hanselman, Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson happened back in 2007 before we ever heard of ASP.NET MVC. Transcript here.

Scott sits down with Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals and talks about beauty, making developers happen, the death (or life) of HTML, the future of Microsoft, and asks if we should care about Rich Internet Applications. DHH is the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, and Martin Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, well-known systems architect and Extreme Programming expert.

--- Hansel Minutes 

So delighted to see such a bold and open discussion between passionate developers with completely different backgrounds and ideas.

Some how, this podcast explains a lots of things that were introduced in ASP.NET after 2007. Not suggesting that this has anything to do with that, but probably things must have been already moving in that direction, part of that led to an open discussion like this.

It is totally surprising to see no comments on this podcast. But this is one of the best of conversations out there.

Trends : .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 Side by Side

Wondering which .NET version is the most popular version? Which .NET version got the most traction in the industry? Which version is the most discussed in the developer circles?

Well, I am not sure if we have any public data that could answer any of those questions, particularly the commercial adoption part. But I looked at trends of search engine traffic and I found that these trends tell a story that is quite consistent with general perception.

Look at the graph below illustrating the search trends of various .NET versions, captured from Google Trends. The story I believe is quite familiar to most .NET developers.

I am not at all surprised to see .NET 1.1 still alive even in our searches, many companies are still running on .NET 1.1 and I guess haven’t found a compelling reason (that totally justify their investments) to upgrade.

You can also see from the snapshot below, Visual studio editions follow the suit more or less closely along with respective .NET versions.

These graphs may not tell the whole story, but on their own they are quite revealing.

On a related note, you may be interested in some thoughts I captured about yet another .NET version in a post a while back:   How Excited Are Businesses About Yet Another Version Of A .NET Framework ? .

I will leave it up to you to read those graphs and interpret based on how much you know about the whole .NET eco system. Let me know if you are surprised in any way.