Andrew L. Van Slaars

I’ve been visiting the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library periodically for the past couple of years, but somehow I only now managed to stumble upon UI-Patterns.com. It’s always good to have another resource to help create better user experiences, so I’m glad I found it. The site is very well organized and cleanly designed, making it enjoyable to use (just as you would expect from a site that focuses on UI/UX). If you do any work that involves a UI, you should check out this site.

Tools, Usability Resources, Tools, UI, Usability, UX

I recently discovered jott.com and so far, I’m finding it to be a very useful service.

If you are not familiar with Jott, it’s a voice based note-taking, communication and reminder service. Once signed up, you call a phone number and use your voice to send email or sms messages, leave yourself reminders, create calendar appointments or even post to a blog or twitter account. Jott allows you to call in and have news feeds read back to you. You can even perform product searches on Amazon by telling Jott what you are looking for. The Amazon results are then emailed to you so you can review them later.

There are hooks in place for other services to integrate Jott and there are quite a few apps (such as wordpress, google calendar and twitter) that are already setup tp work with Jott.

There is also a free iPhone application that works with your Jott account.

At the moment, Jott is free. The business model behind it is unclear, but I’m sure there will eventually be some sort of tiered subscription model or audio ads during phone calls into the service (I could also be completely wrong).

It’s definitely worth checking out.

Productivity, Tools Productivity, Tools

I recently discovered Instapaper. This is a simple app that allows you to bookmark an item to be read later. It is simpler that del.icio.us, in that there are no tags. It doesn’t appear that your list of bookmarked items are meant to be shared or searched. The items are simply put into a list of things you want to read later. So, using a simple bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar, you can load up a web page, click on the bookmark, and that current page is added to your instapaper page. When you want to read the item, go to Instapaper and find that item in your list.

This is great. It’s fast and simple, but there is only one problem. Like del.icio.us, I tend to forget to go to the site to actually look at my bookmarks again. There is a simple solution though… Instapaper exposes an RSS feed of your unread items (you get the link once you’ve added an item to your list). So, I have subscribed to my own feed and now, when I have time to read, my items will show up in Google Reader, which is where I go when I have time to read. Perfect.

Remember, this is more about marking pages to come back and read when you have time. I don’t see this as a replacement for other bookmarking sites.

Learning, Tools bookmarks, rss, Tools

This was originally posted at vanslaars.com in December of 2006. I have not tried this with Visual Studio 2008 (and probably won’t have a reason to anytime soon) but I am pretty confident that it would work with 2008 as well told that it does NOT work.

I don’t do much work with classic ASP pages, but part of my role in my current position involves maintaining legacy ASP websites until they are all converted to ASP.NET 2.0. The thing that really gets to me when working with classic ASP are the generic server errors that tell you practically nothing about what went wrong… this, coupled with the fact that none of the members of the current team were here when these applications were written, makes it very difficult to track down and fix bugs.

Well, there is a solution, yet it seems to be a difficult one to find instructions on. Since the first time I worked my way through this, some additional information has been publshed on various blogs… this is my attempt to help fill the gap for those searching desperately for the steps involved in debugging ASP pages through Visual Studio 2005.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that this requires IIS (5 or 6) and WILL NOT work through VS 2005’s built-in Cassini web server.

Secondly, before you start working through the steps, you need to run your page without debugging (just browsing to it on localhost will do too) BEFORE trying to debug… this requires you to attach the debugger to a process, therefore, the process needs to be started before you attempt to debug (this one got me a couple of time when I first attempted it).

So, here are the steps:

1. Make sure your site is set to run through IIS (not Cassini)
2. Make sure you enable ASP debugging on your server
3. Open your target ASP file in Visual Studio 2005
4. Set a breakpoint somewhere in your ASP page
5. Run your page without debugging from Visual Studio (or browse to the page through localhost)
6. In the Visual Studio menu, go to Debug -> Attach to Process
7. Choose the process:
   In IIS 6 (Server 2003) choose w3wp.exe
   In IIS 5.1 (XP Pro) you want to choose dllhost.exe - Unfortunately, it isn’t this simple though… you will need to attach to the process based on the process id to ensure that you have the correct process. In order to do this: follow these steps:
   1. Download the ListDLLs utility from sysinternals.
   2. Assuming you have the ListDLLs executable available on your machine, in a command prompt, go to the directory which contains ListDLLs and run the following command:
      listdlls.exe -d asp.dll
   3. This will return the process id for the instance of dllhost that loaded asp
   4. Use this ID to select the process in the Attach to Process dialog
8. You may need to refresh your ASP page in the browser to hit your breakpoint.

I hope this helps out the next person having difficulty finding these steps.

Happy Debugging.

Tools, Visual Studio asp, debugging, Tools, visual studio 2005, visual studio 2008

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and while you can’t tell from the front-end, I wish I had done this sooner. The administrative interface has been drastically improved! If you are a wordpress user and haven’t upgraded, you should do it. The whole process took me about 10 minutes and most of that time was spent downloading my backup and uploading the new files. Nothing appears to be broken and all of my theme modifications, posts, and pages seem to have made it through the upgrade without being harmed.

Tools blogging, Tools, wordpress

I log into Gmail and I can go to Google Reader without logging in again. It also works the other way around. The same behavior applies to Google Docs and Google Calendar. This makes sense, same service provider, same login credentials, same browser session.

Now, when I go to Google Analytics, it knows who I am, but I have to enter my password again… ok, maybe they are trying to make analytics more secure? Doesn’t make much sense to me, but ok.

Now if I go to AdSense (you know, to count my millions) it doesn’t even recognize me… you would think a company that can store, index and search ALL of the information, anywhere, would be able to create a consistent user experience across their applications.

It’s not a major issue, but it lacks the level of usability and consistency I would expect from the all-mighty Google.

Tools, Usability adsense, gmail, google, Tools, Usability

My latest project at work has me working with LINQ to SQL. This is definitely cool stuff!

If you are not familiar with LINQ, it is a new feature of .NET 3.5 (C# 3.0/VB 9.0) and stands for Language INtegrated Query. It offers query syntax that can be used to query in-memory objects, XML, Databases, and more. You can learn more about LINQ here, here and here.

As I started working with LINQ, I found myself writing SQL queries and then working backwards to translate them into the appropriate LINQ syntax. This was fine to get the first couple of queries running and allowing me to get my project moving, but I wanted to be able to write LINQ queries without the SQL step and I wanted to be able to test them outside of the context of my application.

I found LINQPad, and it was exactly what I was looking for. To simplifiy, LINQPad allows you to write and run LINQ queries in a similar fashion to writing SQL queries in SQL Server Management Studio or Query Analyzer before that.

LINQPad comes pre-loaded with a couple hundred sample queries and can be used to run snippets of C# 3.0 or VB 9.0 code, not just LINQ queries!

If you are working with LINQ, this is a great way to practice, learn, test and just keep thinking in LINQ when simply querying your databases.

.NET, C#, LINQ, Tools .NET, C#, LINQ, Tools

If you are a regular reader you are aware that I am working on writing a book. Not that I have much spare time right now so every little bit of forward progress helps and if I get a spare moment, I try to take advantage of it.

Unfortunately, sometimes when I do find an opportunity to sit down to write something for my book, I find myself getting distracted with something else that needs to be done. An icon on my desktop or an alert from an application will remind me of something and I’m off in another direction. I’m keeping busy and getting stuff done, but the book isn’t writing itself.

I just discovered a great tool for writing called DarkRoom. It has very few features by design. The key to using DarkRoom is that it covers your entire screen, allowing you to focus on writing without distractions.

If you write regularly and find yourself getting distracted y other software, system messages, emails, the Internet or anything else on your Windows desktop, you should check out DarkRoom. Oh, did I mention it’s free?

You can get DarkRoom here.

Productivity, Tools, Writing blogging, Productivity, Tools, Writing

For those of you who read Lifehacker, this is old news. If you aren’t a regular reader, then this post may be of interest.

Lifehacker is dedicated to providing tips and tricks to make your life more productive. They also have several applications and Firefox add-ons to help make your life easier. They provide a complete list in this post.

I have downloaded and installed several of these tools in the last few minutes… I’ll post more details about some of these tools when I find compelling reasons to do so.

Productivity, Tools lifehacker, Productivity, Tools

I am pretty happy with the switch to Wordpress. One of the features I really like is wordpress‘ plugin capability and the number of available plugins.

One of my favorites has to be the Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin. The shortcut plugin scans the copy in your post and suggests links, badges and Flickr images to embed in your post.

It makes finding relevant information and images a snap, making it much more likely that my posts will be livened up a bit by a well placed image, relevant link or stock ticker for a mentioned company.

If you are a blogger using wordpress, you should check out this plugin. You can also watch this video demo. Enjoy!

Tools blogging, Tools, yahoo