If you haven’t read Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams, you should go out to Amazon right now, buy it and read it. Over the years, I’ve read a lot of books on designing APIs for reusable frameworks, an activity that, academically, would seem to be extremely intuitive, but often fails in practice. Framework Design Guidelines offers an extremely accessible and prescriptive means of designing intuitive APIs for widespread reuse.

Don’t believe me? Need more? Check out the latest episode of ARCast.tv where Krzysztof Cwalina, a Program Manager on the .NET Framework team, discusses strategies for designing reusable libraries with colleague and ARCast.tv co-host, Bob Familiar.

Krzysztof Cwalina on Creating Reusable Frameworks

Green computing. The topic is gaining a lot of mind share in our industry as IT organizations look for ways to build sustainable systems and network infrastructures. This initiative has gained new momentum with the advancement of cloud computing. Massive data centers must be constructed to provide so-called “infinite scalability,” and they must be environmentally responsible while controlling the overall cost of energy to keep them running.

At TechEd Developer last summer, a panel discussion was held to discuss the state of the green computing initiative and discuss way to further it. We caught it on camera and it is now the latest installment of ARCast.tv. This panel includes George Cerbone, Michael Manos, Beth Humphreys, Kathy Malone, Lewis Curtis, and David Platt. Check it out and voice your opinion on this important topic.

What a difference a day makes. Where yesterday’s MIX 2009 keynote with Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie dropped almost too much information on the audience, today’s keynote was much more balanced, focusing on a particular browser and a great story about good design making a positive change in the world.

Dean Hachamovich and Internet Explorer 8
The keynote this morning kicked off with Dean Hachamovich announcing the RTW of Internet Explorer 8. This has been a greatly anticipated release of Microsoft’s new browser since it was officially shown to the world for the first time at MIX last year (has it really been a year already?!?). To be perfect honest, my reaction to IE8’s launch has been pretty much, “Meh.” But after what I saw this morning, I am actually really looking forward to installing the released version. Here are some of the highlights from Dean’s portion of the keynote:

• The new browser can be downloaded manually from microsoft.com/ie8. It will also be available via Windows Update as an optional install. The really great news is that Dean said the final release bits will be available for those of us running Windows 7 beta via Windows Update as well. Supported operating systems include Windows XP, Vista and Windows Server.
• The majority of the the new features in IE8 were driven directly by customer feedback about how they use the web. Using customer feedback to drive product enhancements is not unusual for Microsoft, but you can see a definite focus on making IE8 intuitive and easy to use for everybody. Some of the enhancements include:
  • Both the address and search fields provide comprehensive historical information as well as informational suggestions to get the user more information about the content they’re interested in.
  • The tabbed browsing experience has been enhanced through color coding. As a page opens pages in new tabs, the main tab and additional tabs share a common color, helping the user more easily keep track of the information they’re working with.
  • Pages in different tabs run in their own, isolated space. This keeps a fatal error on one page from taking the entire browser, and thus, other pages down.
  • IE8 seems to render standard web pages as fast or faster than other browsers. This has been my experience as well. However, Dean didn’t address the JavaScript performance issues this morning—I personally think this is an area for the product team to focus on in the next release.
• IE8 is the most secure browser Microsoft has ever released, and if the information Dean presented this morning is to be believed, it is the safest browser on the market today. A white paper on browser security that provide more details can be found at NSS Labs.
• There are also some very cool developer features as well, including:
  • Full support of the CSS 2.1 specification
  • A comprehensive rendering test suite with the W3C organization consisting of 7,000+ tests, many of which show IE8 to implement web standards better that other browsers.
  • Web Slices: These are mini applications that drop a button in the browser under the address window and bring content and web applications directly to the user without them having to navigate to the primary web site.
  • Accelerators: When highlighting content in a web page, a smart tag of sorts pops up providing several interesting options, including getting a map relative to the content, searching for more information on the content and even translating the content into another language.

Deborah Adler and ClearRx
When the launch of IE8 was complete, Bill Buxton returned to the stage to introduce Deborah Adler. Deborah is a graphic designer who used a near tragedy in her family to make an extremely positive change for people.

Deborah told the story of how one evening several years ago, her grandmother accidently took her grandfather’s prescription medication and nearly died. Deborah realized that the reason this incident happened is because both her grandparents were on the same medication, but they were on different doses, and the prescription medication bottles used by all pharmacies at the time are extremely difficult to read and understand. Her grandmother was lucky. Unfortunately, many people die each year by taking taking their prescription medication incorrectly or accidently taking the wrong medication.

As part of her Master’s thesis, Deborah setout to use her design skills to make a prescription medicine bottle that would help avoid these incidents from happening again. I won’t recount the whole story because it’s already been told in detail elsewhere.

However, Deborah’s talk was very thought provoking because, ultimately, what she did wasn’t beyond what most of us are capable of doing. She simply identified something that was obviously wrong, looked at practical ways to to address the issue through better design and found a company that was willing to help her bring her vision to life, that company being Target and the ultimate product being the ClearRx prescription bottles used at their pharmacies.

As software professionals, we see poor design everyday and choose to live with it, choose to accept it. I enjoyed Deborah’s talk because it inspired me to look at software I use all the time and try to find better, more intuitive ways to enhance it. I don’t think I will ever save lives like Deborah did with her design, but all of us can clearly have a positive impact on our users’ daily lives by developing technology that actually helps them do their jobs better.

So that wraps it up for the MIX keynotes this year. Of course, MIX is still going on and we’re all working through what all the new technology we’ve seen over the past couple of days means to us. I’ve personally had several really interesting conversations with people about Silverlight 3, but I am absolutely stoked about Expression Blend 3. I’m working on getting the bits downloaded so I can start building some Silverlight applications. Of course, everything I learn will eventually end up here, so stay tuned.

MIX 2009 kicked off in Las Vegas this morning with a bang. There was a virtual avalanche of announcements made about key products and technologies that will have a lasting impact on web and interactive developers and designers over the next year. Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie tag teamed a very full keynote session, and while I’m personally still trying to digest everything we heard, I wanted to provide you with a summary of all the announcements made this morning. I’m sure this will prompt many follow-ups over the next few days and weeks as I get a chance to dig deeper into Expression Web and Blend, Commerce Server 2009, Azure and, most of all, Silverlight 3.

Bill Buxton
The theme for MIX this year is “Return on Experience,” and that is precisely what Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research focused on during the opening minutes of today’s keynote. Bill began by presenting a new and far more compelling discussion about why user experience (UX) matters (or should matter) in all the software we build. He talked about the history of industrial design and pointed out that some of the most innovative and successful products ever created address the needs of individual people and provided unparalleled simplicity and intuitiveness in their design. Bill also showed that there is a long history of companies and products being very successful during times of economic strife, mentioning several companies founded just before or during the Great Depression which are still in business today.

Bill finished his portion of the keynote by restating Microsoft’s commitment to delivering exception user experience in all of our products, citing that growth in user experience professionals at Microsoft has grown by 150% over the past 7 years.

Scott Guthrie
“The Gu” came on stage after a particularly funny video which featured him, among other things, disco dancing and getting his hair teased, and started right in with Microsoft’s state of the art in what he termed “the standards-based web.” Major announcements in this space include:

• The preview of Expression Web 3 is available for download today!
• SuperPreview is a new tool that is part of Expression Web 3 that will allow web developers to comprehensively test their web pages for cross-browser compatibility before publishing them online. If the designer is working from an image mock-up of a page, they can do a side-by-side comparison of the mock and their designed page. They can even overlap them to get a better idea of who close they’ve come to implementing the intended design. Even more cool than that, they can preview the page in many different browsers. SuperPreview will render the page in any locally installed browser and will even connect to a cloud service to render the page in a browser you don’t have on your machine. For example, if I have IE8 and FireFox 3 installed on my machine, but I want to see how my page would render in Safari, SuperPreview will pull a Safari instance from the cloud to show the output. This is going to make SuperPreview invaluable to web designers.
• The ASP.NET MVC 1.0 framework shipped this morning and is available for immediate download for free.
• A series of improvements for ASP.NET 4.0, including:
  • Enhanced web form development
  • Integration of ASP.NET MVC and AJAX
  • Distributed caching
• Enhancements to Visual Studio 2010 for web developers, including:
  • New and enhanced tools for JavaScript, AJAX and JQuery development
  • SharePoint developers become first class citizens in the IDE with new development tools for MOSS
  • New publishing and deployment tools, including the ability to keep multiple web.config files specific to a deployment environment, i.e. development, test, staging and production
• General availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2 beta. This awesome little application provides you with the ability to get all the tools and technologies for developing web applications for the ASP.NET platform in one place—no more jumping from web site to web site trying to find the installers. Just click on a check box, hit the Install button and you’re there!
• Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 available today.
• Customer-driven enhancements to the Windows Azure Service Platform, including:
  • FastCGI/PHP and .NET full trust, allowing applications to share data and resources much more easily
  • SQL Data Services will adopt a more familiar ADO.NET interface, making a true relational database in the cloud
  • Windows Azure is schedule to ship this year!

As if this wasn’t enough, Scott moved into his talk about Silverlight 3, the preview of which is available today. Here are the highlights:

• There are over 10,000 web sites in the world today using Silverlight, and there are over 300,000 developers and designer actively developing with Silverlight.
• A new Silverlight version of the World Wide Telescope, previously available only in WPF, is going live today.
• A new SDK for integrating Microsoft Virtual Earth into your Silverlight applications will be available for download this week.
• Silverlight 3 will provide cross-platform support for hardware acceleration.
• Silverlight 3 will include the H.264, AAC and MPEG-4 codecs; it will also include a raw bit-stream audio and video API which will allow developers to create custom codecs in managed code if they need/want to.
• Silverlight 3 includes enhanced logging capabilities for managing application access analysis
• IIS Media Services
  • This will be a free download that will enable any IIS7 web server to provide smooth video or audio streaming services
  • Media Services will provide advanced logging, bit-rate throttling and edge caching
  • Media Services applications will be developed and deployed using Expression Encoder, so the experience will be familiar and seemless
• There are several enhancements to Silverlight 3 in graphics, including:
  • GPU acceleration and hardware compositing
  • Perspective 3D, essentially moving 2D objects in the UI in a 3D space
  • An API for bitmap images and pixels
  • Shader effects
  • Hardware acceleration for Deep Zoom
• There are also several new features in Silverlight 3 that will make RIA development even easier, including:
  • “Deep linking,” which is the ability for a user to link to a specific place inside a Silverlight application
  • Navigation and search engine optimization
  • Improved text quality
  • Library caching support
  • More than 100+ controls available from Microsoft, not counting those made by partners
• Silverlight 3 will ship with the native ability to run outside the browser. A Silverlight application running outside the browser implements the same security model as Silverlight in the browser, and even has built-in automated update abilities. Yep, drop a new version of the application on the web server and the Silverlight app on the user’s machine automatically updates. Say goodbye to complex deployment issues for desktop applications!
• The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver will be streamed live and on-demand using Silverlight
• And, in what was possibly the most incredible news I heard all morning, with all of these new, incredible features, the Silverlight 3 installer package is actually 40k SMALLER than the Silverlight 2 installer. I guess there really is something to rigorous code review practices!

Finally, The Gu finished up the keynote this morning with a look at Expression Blend 3 CTP. Here are the highlights:

• Blend 3 will include a new tool called SketchFlow, which will allow you basically create a digital “cocktail napkin” design of your application, visually mapping interactions between different application windows, share these drafts with customers, enter feedback directly into the form and send the feedback to designers in Blend. From where I was sitting, this looked a lot like the work item management tools in Visual Studio Team System. You’ve heard of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)? How about DLM: Design Lifecycle Management!
• Support for Silverlight development in Eclipse, both for Windows and the Mac OS.
• New data-binding tools in Blend 3 support the ability to connect to sample data or generate sample date. You can also edit the test data right in the design environment, giving designers unprecedented testing capabilities.

Every bullet point above could easily be a separate post, and I intend to do as many as I can. Anyway, that’s the summery of this morning’s announcements, and there are more coming tomorrow. The links to many of the products above are not live yet. I’ll do follow-up posts with links to the goods as they become available. Until tomorrow…

Ah, Microsoft Access. I can still remember writing my first data-driven web application on my PC using Access as my data repository, only to upload it to a web server and have it seize up the minute more than ten people tried to use the site at the same time. What Access provides in ease of use it lacks in scalability, but still, many enterprise line-of-business and web applications still leverage Access in the data layer. Eventually, these applications need to migrate to a more scalable RDBMS, but taking that effort on can be daunting without solid experience and guidance.

This week’s episode of ARCast is all about the data layer and the role that Access has to play in it. In this interview, Luke Chung, founder and president of FMS, shares his view on Microsoft Access database solutions -- where they fit well, what challenges users and developers often face in creating and maintaining them, and how they have evolved from standalone desktop solutions to having the capability to be integrated with web-based and SharePoint centric solutions.

He further explains primary reasons why some Access database solutions are migrated to SQL Server database based solutions, what different approaches are used to carry out migrations, and how to get started with the migration process when a large number of Access databases are involved.