November, 2008

Giving your Application a voice

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 24 Nov 08 - 7:15pm

No, I’m not talking about using speech synthesis to abuse your users when they make a mistake – though the idea has merit … I’m instead referring to a blog entry written by Oren Eini back in August.

Oren made the suggestion that your application should have a blog – a place where it can post informative messages about normal operation and abnormal conditions.

Finding Configuration Files

Submitted by Bevan on Sun, 23 Nov 08 - 5:10pm

Here’s a useful technique for finding the location of configuration files.

Each AppDomain has a base directory from which it loads assemblies – when you double click a WinForms or WPF application, the new process that starts up has an AppDomain whose base directory is the directory in which your exe is located.

Scheduling Downtime

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 19 Nov 08 - 7:35pm

Now I'm all in favour of keeping your users informed - letting them know in advance of planned downtime is more than simple good manners, it's necessary.

So today when I came across an announcement on a prominent vendors website, I initially thought it was a good thing.

downtime.jpg
downtime.jpg

A Server out of Space

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 18 Nov 08 - 5:52pm

This morning I discovered that our StarTeam server was being uncooperative – refusing to accept check-ins because of a lack of available storage space.

Users were receiving this message:

space.png

A quick look at the appropriate network share revealed plenty of space – while the hives were configured to use up to 99% of the available space, the share was only 86% full.

Weirdness.

Delving into the log file, I found this message (formatted for this post):

Being a Tidy Kiwi

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 11 Nov 08 - 8:44pm

Going through blog posts that I’ve flagged for follow-up, I found a gem from 2006, “On Graffiti and Broken Windows” by Stuart Caborn.

The psychological and sociological trends that Stuart references, from Malcolm Gladwells “Tipping Point”, as well as others I’ve read (such as “Freakonomics” by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt) all point to the value of taking the time to be tidy.

Small Fonts

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 11 Nov 08 - 8:10pm

A recent question on StackOverflow.com asked Why use Monospace fonts in your IDE.

One of the answers referenced the use of Comic Sans as a font for coding. I couldn't quite believe it, so I tried it out - and found that Comic Sans is actually very readable at small font sizes, easy on the eye and very compact. Check this out:

fonts.png
fonts.png

(Click to enlarge)

Subversion Fun

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 10 Nov 08 - 4:54pm

Sometimes a good error message is all it takes ...

subversion.jpg
subversion.jpg

This one is concise, accurate and completely uninformative. Sigh.