Intuit Labs blog – echominder has left the building

The genesis of a truly useful and innovative Intuit product...

Intuit Labs blog – echominder has left the building

...which they, of course, killed.

Nice going.

Comcast DVR & Controller: Pain & Suffering Incarnate.

Bravo to "Rian" who posted this blog entry:

Reflections on user experience: Remote control usability: Comcast vs. Logitech Harmony

I just had to respond with a comment since this is a real hot-button for me these days (i.e. Comcast's DVR un-usability...):

Saying that the Comcast remote and its accompanying DVR system is "Bad" or "isn't that good" is being kind.

I have never seen a bigger pile of steaming crap usability-wise in my life (save for the Bobrick B-2888 Toilet Tissue Dispenser). The Comcast DVR software is pathetically unresponsive (and it's not just unresponsive for OnDemand programs, despite what the service tech tried to tell me...). The Comcast system actually makes my wife visibly angry to even have to touch the remote and use their horrible product.

Unfortunately, I would have to now fork over a significant amount of cash to purchase a TiVo that will do digita & HD, which unfortunately I don't have at the moment... But if I had the cash in hand, I would go buy one in a second and not think twice to drop-kick the Comcast DVR unit and the controller. We have actually kept our analog TiVo in the other room, and guess what? it gets more use because of the pain the Comcast system causes.

Shame on comcast for even thinking of putting out such a lame product. Comcast desperately needs to read "The Essentials of Interaction Design" and totally rearchitect its hardware and software approach.

No wonder they tried to acquire TiVo. Oh yeah... and failed. LOL.

ASP.NET Bug: Button.OnClientClick

I really don't understand this one.

According to the ASP.NET MSDN online documentation for Button.OnClientClick Property (System.Web.UI.WebControls), you use Button.OnClientClick to assign a client-side script (javascript) when the button is clicked (for example if you want to have the button perform some action(s) before submitting, or to short-circuit the click entirely).

However, I couldn't understand why the client-side onclick handler was not getting rendered, no matter what I tried!!!

Then I scrolled down to the bottom and noticed the comment by user contributor "Perley":

"MS has made it so that if you disable the button on the server then the onclick attribute is not even rendered to the client"

Mystery solved.

I had indeed set the button to be disabled in the markup, and it was flat-out not rendering the onclick handler in the HTML.

I fixed the problem by wiring up the onclick event for the button manually using a pageLoad function, but still it was a hassle.

I really think the people who designed, approved, and coded that "feature" should get their head checked, because, seriously... if a button is disabled initially, don't you think it's possible that the button - a user interaction device - might become enabled at some point, and not through server-side intervention???

.NET Rocks! Epsiode 406: Catching up with Scott Bellware

This episode of .NET Rocks! features an interview with Scott Bellware, who describes some new unit testing and coding practices that sounded very innovative, introducing the concepts of usability into your code:

.NET Rocks! - Epsiode 406: Catching up with Scott Bellware

...I just thought some might find it interesting. I did.

The Difference between "const" and "readonly" in C#

It has been baffling me for a while since I've used the two keywords for pretty much the same purposes, but after reading a little of the documentation, the difference between the two became much more clear (emphasis mine):

The readonly keyword differs from the const keyword.

A const field can only be initialized at the declaration of the field.
A readonly field can be initialized either at the declaration or in a constructor.

Therefore, readonly fields can have different values depending on the constructor used.

Also, although a const field is a compile-time constant, the readonly field can be used for run-time constants, as in this line:

public static readonly uint l1 = (uint)DateTime.Now.Ticks;

SubWeaver: a Subversion plugin for Dreamweaver!

Awesome... a Subversion (SVN) plugin for Dreamweaver! Exactly what I was looking for!

SourceForge.net: SubWeaver

The cool thing about it is that it integrates with TortoiseSVN (at least mine did), so that part of the interface feels very familiar!

Way to go, guys!

WPF: Getting at information entered in Assembly Information dialog

Had a perplexing problem with Getting at information entered in Assembly Information dialog in a WPF application, and it was very quickly answered by Krisha Barghav on the MSDN forums:

WPF: Getting at information entered in Assembly Information dialog

anything you enter inside Assemblyinformation dialog sits in the AssemblyInfo.cs

You can access these values using Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly.GetCustomAttributes(true/false);

If you print the types of attributes returned, you can see something like shown below.

System.Windows.ThemeInfoAttribute

System.Diagnostics.DebuggableAttribute

System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CompilationRelaxationsAttribute

System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComVisibleAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyFileVersionAttribute

System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RuntimeCompatibilityAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyTitleAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyDescriptionAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyConfigurationAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyCompanyAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyProductAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyCopyrightAttribute

System.Reflection.AssemblyTrademarkAttribute

So if you want to access the Description entered in the Assembly, you can do something like this.

foreach (object o in Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetCustomAttributes(true))

{

if (o is AssemblyDescriptionAttribute) Debug.WriteLine((o as AssemblyDescriptionAttribute).Description);

}

That is just an example.

Hope this helps.

Worked great for me!