At work we do almost all of our UI design mockups in Visio but because they're static it's sometimes hard to get a feel for what will really happen when people click on things and how usable it is.  In other words it's easy enough to see if the "look" is right, but what about the... Read more

I don't quite know what to make of this.  There's a bloke named Nicholas Feltron who has made stats of everything he's done this year and then published it as an annual report. One one hand, it's a great example of communicating information and it's excellent design work.  On the other hand it's scary as hell... Read more

Ok, I know you should never post angry, but I'll run the risk in this case. Because of the shortage of skilled .NET developers I often have to turn to contractors to get quality people in the door in the timeframe I need.  In the past I've picked up some top notch quality people.  People I... Read more

Many people can tell when a development culture isn't healthy. Much like being able to tell that the wind is blowing they can see that things aren't right by looking at the evidence around them. High development costs, substandard quality, missed deadlines, code not matching design, business priorities not being met, no responsibility taken by those... Read more

Over the last few weeks I haven't exactly done a lot of posting. My apologies for that. There's been a few reasons: 1. I've been absolutely rushed off my feet at work recently and finish each day mentally drained and not feeling all that bloggish. 2. (This could be the main reason) I bought a Nintendo... Read more

It looks like you can now help "save the world" by doing your bit to follow the Kyoto protocol (regardless of wether your country has signed up or not). Each and every electrical devices consumes electricity and this contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.Koyoto Potato is a way of tracking your idle time, and trading it with... Read more

This is kind of sad, but fairly amusing. There's a list of 10 short movies based on famous video games, including classics like Double Dragon, Tekken, Grand Theft Auto & Zelda.The Zelda one is really quite cool, especially when the "actor" does one of Links famous whirlwind sword moves (and when he's cutting bushes looking for... Read more

You've just gone and got yourself a nice shiny new Wii (well done by the way) and you've got it connected to the internet (maybe even using the LAN adapter) and now you want to find someone nearby that you can play with/against.What to do? What to do? Well, you could always go doorknocking in nearby... Read more

On a few occasions in the past I've been asked about some of the problems you can have in implementing scrum.  Something about having already made (and learned from) plenty of mistakes seems to make me qualified to give advice on what not to do, and to offer a few tips on approaches to take. There... Read more

If you're from a colder climate or the northern hemisphere, then you may not be aware of the dangers of overexposure to the sun and the fact that over time you can develop skin cancers. According to the Australian Cancer Council, Australia has the highest rate of skin cancers in the world and over 1,400 people... Read more

Well, the Vista release has been thoroughly uneventful, so the "Wow!" certainly didn't start there. On the other hand the WPF blog has a post about something that really makes me say "Wow!" and it's even Vista related.There's an awesome WPF/E Vista mockup on the web, complete with Office 2007 applications and other cool stuff. Check... Read more

The current dot com boom is focused around Web 2.0 sites. The definition of what a Web 2.0 site is changes depending on who you're talking to, what phase the moon is in and how much interest Google and Yahoo! are paying to it.The good news is that even if you don't know what one is,... Read more

Yay! Firebug (the cool web development extension for Firefox) is now out of beta.If you haven't seen or used this thing, then it's time to crawl out from under your rock and check it out. It's an invaluable tool for anyone doing any sort of web development.Get more info about it on the Firebug blog entry.P.S.... Read more

This was a weird one.... I recently setup a web application on a testing machine (which had a bunch of other web applications on it).  The front login page appeared OK, but when I tried login I just got blank pages back.  If I tried bringing up pages manually (ie by entering the URL directly) they appeared but... Read more

We all know about Pong - the game that started it all...Well you can now relive those heady days of yesteryear with the Pong Clock! A clock that tells you the time by playing pong forever. As the minutes tick by the right player wins, and as the hours tick over the left player wins. Ingenious!!Best... Read more

... well, up to version 1.0 anyway. Scott Guthrie has all the details on his blog. ASP.NET AJAX version 1.0 (the project formerly known as Atlas) is basically a framework for building AJAX functionality into .NET app's and it won't give you much out of the box. That's where the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit comes in.... Read more

You may have noticed that external links on this blog now have a "preview" window attached to them (thanks to Snap!) so you can get an idea of what the page is like that a link will take you to.Hopefully you like it and find it useful. If you don't you can always turn the feature... Read more

As a follow up to yesterdays post on SourceMonitor and CruiseControl.NET integration, Eden Ridgway has done some really nice work and posted a few styles sheets to help you create a SourceMonitor Top 15 Summary of worst methods so you can target your refactoring efforts.Thing good thing is you don't have to use MSBuild as Eden... Read more

CruiseControl.NET (ccnet) includes style sheets and integration instructions for Vil - a static analysis tool that provides a whole bunch of metrics for your code such as cycolmatic complexity, lines of code, number of methods, etc all of which are useful in monitoring the health of your application. Unfortunately Vil hasn't been updated for quite some... Read more

In my "spare time" I like to tweak windows and recently I've started using alternatives to the standard Alt+Tab behaviour provided by Windows XP. A quick search on Google for alt-tab replacements returns more results than there are candles on your grandmothers birthday cake. The one I've settled on is TaskSwitchXP.  Why?  Because it not only... Read more