Thibaut Van Spaandonck’s blog

Book review : Guidelines for Online Success

Written by industry experts, this book is a collection of best practices for web application and website development. Divided into 6 chapters (Interface & design, Marketing & Communication, Technology & Programming, Technical advice, Content/Content management and E-commerce) and widely illustrated, “do” & “don’t” are discussed about many notions of web development. Anyway, this book doesn’t assumes his title at all as it’s more a collection of pictures of nice websites than practices to follow. Even worse, among the few practices we’re given, many of them are completely unuseful and even redundant.

Pros

• Full-color book
• Very well crafted, original divisions into “tabbed” chapters with color schemes for each one of them

Cons

• Absolutely not a collection of “guidelines”, too few text and way too many pictures
• Some “guidelines” are completely dumb, such as “don’t make ugly layouts” and “don’t hide your navigation”
• Because the book is written by many people, some “guidelines” are redundant. I was told at least 5 times in the book that “my website should not take too long to load”

Conclusion

Absolutely not interesting about the “guidelines” aspect, but the book stills remains valuable if you’re using it like a “Web Design Index” for inspiration of best web productions.

Visug : lightweight stubs & detours for .NET

Peli De Halleux, a belgian guy now working at Microsoft Research (Redmond) came back in Belgium at the Visug to talk about the project he’s working on. Stubs, Moles and Pex form together a lightweight framework to test .NET applications.

Stubs

Stubs is a stubbing framework solely based on delegates. Various examples can be found here.

Moles

Here’s an example of what you can accomplish with Moles, allowing you to replace any .NET method :

Pex

And here, a diagram showing at a high-level view how Pex works :

Pex is an automated whitebox testing tool for .NET. From your code and parameterized unit tests, test code is automatically generated in C# and test results can be seen in the “input/output table”.

Project-related resources

I could copy-paste the great description of the project off the official website… But I instead recommend to those of you who are interested in this to take a look at the following resources, explaining you what Stubs, Moles and Pex are all about in the details.

Have a nice reading

Book review : The Zen of CSS Design

Almost every Web Developer knows the famous CSS Zen Garden, a project created by Web Designer Dave Shea aimed to encourage the use of standards-compliant CSS for a better web. Raw HTML was available to Web Designers who had to create some CSS that can completely change the layout of the website, thus underlying the power of semantical XHTML and best use of CSS. This full-color book, released following the CSS Zen Garden project success, is divided into 7 chapters : View Source, Design, Layout, Imagery, Typography, Special Effects and Reconstruction. Each of these ones teaches you best practices to CSS development (including cross-browser concerns in the details) but also to good Web Design in general.

Pros

• Awesome book, very instructive
• A very interesting approach, based on the best submissions (Zen Garden project) to teach best practices and tricks of expert Web Designers
• Cross-browser concerns are explained very well, into the details and an overview of the alternatives to cope with ‘em is given.
• A very instructive course about Web Design (imagery, typography, layout, …)
• All chapters based on real world projects and not on academical examples
• The best and more complete book about Web Design I’ve read to date

Cons

• Not really a con, but this book is “medium to advanced” level, so good understanding of CSS is required before starting. Basics of CSS aren’t covered as the book immediately digs into the details, exceptions and advanced use of CSS

Conclusion

An instant-classic, awesome and very instructive book that every Web Designer must have on his/her bookshelf ! Finally note that you should have a good understanding of CSS prior to reading this book and have an interest in Web Design as some chapters such as “imagery” and “typography” are purely dedicated to this field.

Visual Studio 2010 new logo & MSDN website refresh

A new logo for Visual Studio (illustrated above) and the MSDN were recently introduced. I personally find ‘em pretty damn sweet : sober yet powerful. Also note that the MSDN has not just a new logo, but the whole website was refreshed at the same time, featuring new services. Details about this can be found on Scott Hanselman’s blog.

Book review : Silverlight 3

I’ve just finished reading Silverlight 3 - Programmer’s reference book, which is written by 5 people of Infragistics, one of the world leaders in user interface development tools. Among the authors, we can find Jason Beres who came at Visug talking about user experience (see related post here). This full-color book gives us an overview of what can be achieved using Silverlight 3. Interesting and very well crafted, this book targets as well a graphists audience as the developers one. Silverlight is very much about User Experience so if you’re not interested by the UI part of an app, you might want to pick up another, purely technical book. Also note that there are a lot of chapters, so various things are covered but not as deeply as you would wish sometimes.

Pros

• Written by a buch of experts in the field (guys from Infragistics)
• Many aspects of Silverlight are covered, getting you started for writing nice apps
• Not too long to read (460 pg, appendices excluded) which is a change compared to the ASP.NET book for example (almost 2 000 pg)
• Full-color, which suits very well to the UI context of the book

Cons

• As many things are covered, you won’t have a comprehensive book on Silverlight here (there’s a chapter which is only 15 pg long)
• Title of the book says Programmer’s reference but it ain’t because of its lack of depth

Conclusion

A nice book I enjoyed reading and that I would recommend if you’re not looking for the absolute bible for Silverlight 3. As I already said before on this blog, so many technologies are being released in a fast-paced fashion that it’s interesting to read some books with a “medium-depth” approach, making best use of your time.