.Net

Some Worst User Experiences

1) After filling up a huge forum and clicking submit all fields get reset and you see some message like password needs to be atleast 8 characters.

2) Somehow after the frustration, you successfully register and check you email to find that you still did not receive the confirmation email.

3) Even after a couple of hours you dont receive the email.

4) Losing the context i.e after registering / logging in you get redirected to the default page instead the original page you intended to go.

5) Not mentioning the rules in web forms like minimum characters / special characters required / disallowed characters etc…

We developers want to make User Experience better not worse. And also remember that User Experience can play a major role in the success of your website.

Some Worst User Experiences

Swamy Vivekanandas qoutes

“The older I grow ,the more everything seems to me to lie in manliness.”

The background,the reality,of everyone is that same eternal,ever blessed,ever pure and ever perfect one.It is the atman,the soul,in the saint and the sinner,in the happy and the miserable,in the beautiful and ugly,in men and in animals;it is the same throughout.It is the shining one.

Here I stand and if I shut my eyes,and try to conceive my existence,”I”,”I”,”I”,– what is the idea before me?The idea of a body.Am I,then,nothing but a combination of material substances?The Vedas declare,”No”.I am a spirit living in a body.I am not the body.The body will die,but I shall not die.Here am I in this body;it will fall,but I shall go on living.

The Vedas say the whole world is a mixture of independence and dependence,of freedom and slavery,but through it all shines the soul independent,immortal,pure,perfect,holy.For if it is independent,it cannot perish,as death is but a change,and depends upon conditions;if independent,it must be perfect,for imperfection is again but a condition ,and therefore dependent.And this immortal and perfect soul must be the same in the highest God as well as in the humblest man,the difference between them being only in the degree in which this soul manifests itself.

It cannot be that the soul knows,but it is knowledge.It connot be that the soul is happy,it is happiness itself.That which is happy,has borrowed its happiness;that which has knowledge,has received its knowledge;and that which has relative existence,has only a reflected existence.

hat very thing which we now see as the universe,will appear to us as God (Absolute),and that very God who has so long been external will appear to be internal,as our ownself.

Swamy Vivekanandas qoutes

An update on Development Status Of KMarks August 26th 2008

Previous Posts regarding KMarks:
A New Sun Rises - KMarks
KMarks - Not your grandmothers bookmarks

For those interested in KMarks and its development status here is an update.

Development of KMarks has started and I am devoting around 15 - 20 hrs a week on writing code and another 10 - 15 hours planning out the phases, features that go into releases and of course architecting the current release of KMarks code named ‘Signature’. The planned features list grew to 50 features, but only 2 features will be released in ‘Signature’ release. The first four releases may not be exciting enough. The 5th release would be decent and will be much similar to existing social bookmarking web sites. But from release 6, all the excitement and fun begins. Each release after the 6th release would give you a ‘WOW’ experience.

An approximatish… timeline: (Everything below is tentative)
September 20ish 2008 … - Testing of Signature release starts.
October 20ish 2008 … - Public Beta Testing of Signature (Invites only)
Early 2009 … - Goes live.
End of 2009 - Release 5.
Start of 2010 - Release 6+. All the fun and excitement starts.

Now as for the current development status:
Prototyping 3 different UI experiences and demoing it to 3 persons who are my friends, get their feedback and select one of them. I am done with prototyping 1 UI experience. And I plan to get the other 2 done before the long weekend.

Using SubSonic for Data Access.
MySQL for database.
ASP.Net 2.0
C#
Ajax
JQuery

BTW KMarks is just a codename for the entire project, when it gets released it gets a name for itself.

An update on Development Status Of KMarks August 26th 2008

12 Performance Tips For ASP.Net WebApplications

1) Disable Session State when it is not needed.
This can be set in the Page directive as follows:
<%@ Page EnableSessionState="false" %>

2) Turn Off ViewState when not needed
This can be done for controls individually or turned off for a whole page as follows:
<%@ Page EnableViewState="false" %>

3) Minimize use of Exceptions
Don’t use exceptions to control flow of program. Exceptions are costly.

4) Minimize use of COM Components
If possible port your COM Components to .Net code and use them.

5) Cache Data
There could be some data which rarely changes such as States In USA, If these are stored in database, retrieve them during Application Start and cache them. If you need you can write some code where you can manually force refreshing this data. If you want to know the details of implementation, throw in a comment and I will cover it in a later blog post.

6) Cache Output
Cache the output of page or User Control whenever possible.

7) Disable Debug Mode
Debug mode can be disabled in web.config by setting ““.

8 ) DataReader is very fast for forward only reading of data
DataReader is very fast but can be used only in forward only read mode. So whenever appropriate use it.

9) Avoid Unnecessary round trips to the server.
Some of the round trips can be avoided by doing certain things on Client Side for example validations.

10) Use AJAX wherever appropriate
Doing a postback and loading a whole page for a small change could be expensive, use AJAX wherever appropriate.

11) To reduce the size of ASP.Net pages, the viewstate can be stored on the server.
You can reduce the amount of data transferred by storing the viewstate on the server itself. Want some code wait for a future article.

12) Enable Buffering
If possible don’t turn off buffering.

12 Performance Tips For ASP.Net WebApplications

Links For August 22nd 2008

ASP.Net:
Caching Interview Questions Part 1
Dependency injection made easy for the ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET AJAX Development Approach Part 2

Web:
HTML 5: The event loop, hashchange, and more
Create HotKey combinations with jQuery
Debugging Ajax Using FireBug
Speed Up Your Website By PreLoading - Example Included

Podcasts:
ASP.NET Podcast Show #124 - Speed up big Apps with Velocity!
4 Elements of Professional WPF Applications
ASP.NET Podcast Show #118 - Paul on Peer-To-Peer with Windows Communication Foundation

WCF:
How to Build REST apps on .NET using WCF

Silverlight:
A Personal Guide to Getting Started with Silverlight

Links For August 22nd 2008