Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Smashing Magazine offers 8 usability check-points you should be aware of - Avoid Pop-ups Don’t change users’ window size. Don’t use too small font sizes. Don’t have unclear link text. Avoid dead links. Have at most one animation per page. Make it easy to contact you. Open internal links in the same window. The article explains how if your visitors don’t understand how they can get from point A to point B they won’t use your site.

Luckily for ASP.NET developers there are some cool free ASP.NET Charting Tools that are as good as the commercial ones. 1. Microsoft Chart controls - Some interesting facts : Microsoft acquired Dundas Data Visualization Intellectual Property in April 2007 and is integrating this technology in different Microsoft products. New Chart and Gauge report items were already released as part of SQL Reporting Services 2008. Microsoft Chart controls (ASP.NET and Windows Forms) was released at PDC 2008 Microsoft Chart control is based on Dundas Chart source code version 5.5 Microsoft Chart control is available as a separate installation for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and will be part of .NET Framework 4.0. 2. CarlosAg's WebChart  control  - Supports 8 chart types Can be used with WinForms & Web 3. Google Charts API Includes a growing number of Image & Interactive chart types API is URL based which means; no installation of any components is required 4. NPlot Includ...

Roughly a year after it has been in Beta, IE8 was released last week. It is more standards compliant than the versions before it. This is good news for web developers as they won't have to write browser specific code. IE8 also introduces new features like Accelerators and Web Slices that will surely interest web developers. Accelerators are XML files that let you act on data in a web page by interacting with web services. It is more direct than using a search provider which again does not adapt to all scenarios. Accelerators appear in the context menu. Although it may look a little daunting at first, it is simple to create and deploy as it all it takes is filling up an XML template (borrowed from a MSDN code sample). The OpenService Accelerators Developer Guide explains what the elements & attributes of the Accelerator XML file mean. I prefer previewing PDF & Word files in web pages that I surf instead of opening them directly. Google Search & GMail have a way to pre...