10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of

If you are like me, you are designer, developer and tester of your web application. Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about collaborating with designers, but in the ‘real-world’ we have yet to be able to employee one of these people so you design your site the best you can taking ideas from other sites and putting your own twist on them. Often I find myself so immersed in technical function of the site that I can loose focus on the fact that my interface has to appeal to the common denominator, at these points I find myself referring to a top 10 worst list to help me take out those features which do not work for everyone.

Smashing Magazines has just published an article where they review the top 10 things not to do with web user interface design, to read what they have to say go here http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Devexpress – Refractor! Free (ASP.NET)

Last week Devexpress released an update to their popular Refactor! For ASP.NET. This tool provides a number of refactorings to ASP.NET developers using VB.NET or C#.

Refactoring is the method of taking existing code and reducing its complexity. This may sound scary to some especially as you used to have to be very careful refactoring as you could disable your whole program but Refactor removes the risk and gives you some time saving methods.

The tool integrates with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and provides the same refactoring that C# already supports and more, and the best thing is it’s faster and uses animation to show you the result of you refactor before you commit to it.

To download this great free tool go here http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/IDETools/RefactorASP/

ASP.NET Performance Tips

I spend my life reading as much as I can about how to squeeze that little bit of extra performance out of my applications and in the Web deployment world there are so many areas you need to be aware of, the client browser, the server config and your ASP.NET application. So when ever there is a list of techniques to employ or avoid when developing ASP.NET I lap it up especially as each time I developer I like to do as little boilerplate coding as possible and use the framework controls which are not always the most efficient.

Miguel Angel Carrasco has just release 20 ASP.NET development tips on his blog at http://www.realsoftwaredevelopment.com. The list is short but comprehensive with some very useful tips on ASP.NET do’s and don’ts.