The Portland office loves a practical joke or two... While Jeremy and Aaron were out of the office for their annual partner meeting, we took the liberty of redecorating their offices. Check out the story below (thanks to my wife!) to see how it all turned out.

There once were five boys who worked hard all day.

Two went out and three stayed to play.

(Aaron's office)

(Jeremy's Office)

Two more left leaving one all by himself.

(Justin's Desk)

So he shifted the blame onto somebody else.

(Scott's Desk)  

Part of being on our technical team is looking for more efficient processes that we can employ. Lately, we’ve been looking very closely at ways to stop “rehashing” the same code over and over. We’ve noticed areas where code tends to be very similar across many websites. Why re-write it for each one?

We’re looking into two types of tools to aid in this process: ORM and dynamic code generation.

Object Relational Mapping (ORM) allows us to generate the basic code needed to store and retrieve objects from a database without having to physically write a line of code. There are many more pluses to these set of tools, but this would lead to much more efficiency for our technical team. Some of the ones we’ll be learning more about are:

• Subsonic: http://www.subsonicproject.com
• Entity Framework: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx
• NHibernate: https://www.hibernate.org/343.html

Our other option is simply pure dynamic code generation. I’ve been researching T4 templates (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) and love the possibilities! The idea is to create a template that represents a coding structure you write often, then have the system use that template to generate a code base for you. These templates are being used by many companies in order to increase efficiency and productivity. In fact, the ORM Subsonic listed above uses T4 templates when generating code to represent a database.  

You can learn more about Microsoft’s MSDN page for T4 templates here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx.

As always, we’ll keep you updated as we continue to work on more efficient, repeatable processes for our projects.

One of my favorite sites to learn more about the .net framework is found at wiki.asp.net. I spend a good amount of time reading through the numerous articles presented on the site.  The ASP.NET Developer wiki allows me to learn something new quickly and from the view of my peers. Here’s a list of recommended articles that I’ve found beneficial: of some of the articles I’ve found most beneficial:

• ASP.NET Open Source Projects: This article provides a number of links to open source projects developed in .net.  I’m a firm believer that you can learn a great deal by looking at others’ code, it’s probably my favorite learning mechanism and way to spark new ideas.
• Design Patterns: If you don’t know about design patterns, I’d recommend doing some research about them as they can save you a great deal of time.  You’ll be amazed to see how many of the design patterns described in this article are either present in the code you write or within the framework you use.
• Architecture: These links will teach you about everything from software architecture to the asp.net framework architecture. A lot of these articles are interesting reads that I guarantee will help solidify your knowledge base.

Hope you enjoy some good reads!

Recently while looking around www.asp.net I found a link to a pretty cool tool for beginning dot net developers.  The Ramp Up program teaches the basics of dot net development through a series of articles and webcasts. 

This is a great resource to quickly and cheaply learn a little about the dot net framework and all it has to offer.  The site offers a wide range of information with a focus on asp.net, but also with information on general web development terms and technologies.  I think even experienced developers might be able to get some use out of these materials.

One additional cool feature about the Ramp Up program is that Microsoft offers a somewhat varied range of discounts on training once you’ve completed a “track.”  Discounts range from 25% of off any MCTS exam to 50% off of E-Learning collections.

Check out the site here.

These days, most users associate popup windows with spam and annoyance. Nobody enjoys chasing popup windows when they open in a new tab or even behind the current browser. Over the past 1.5 years, one of our goals has been to exclude popup windows from our UI, a trend seen across the Web. Our only exception to this is when we have an external link on a client’s site. If a client links to a site outside of their own, we use a popup window so the user isn’t completely taken off of the client’s site.

For better user-experience, we now use modals instead of popup windows. A modal is a modern UI pattern similar to a popup window where a section of HTML pops up on top of the webpage, and the remaining portion of the webpage is typically greyed out. The user can focus on the “popped up” content, while never leaving the page. Modal technology helps us create a more integrated experience on the websites we build. No longer do users have to interact with a random window in order to pass information to a site: they can do so in a way that feels natural and expected.

Happy Holidays! Is there any better way to recharge your batteries than through vacation or spending time with family? This past week my wife, Shauna, and I took a 16 hour drive to southern California to spend this favorite holiday of mine with her family. We ate and ate, and while we were eating, I learned a little Guitar Hero and did a little research on topics that could benefit our software development in the future.

We’re always on the lookout for the best, latest ways to improve our websites. One of the new concepts that I researched over the holiday, and will discuss in more detail in the future, is design patterns. The basic idea is that when we write a piece of code, there are particular coding patterns that can be reused throughout an application. Using these patterns allows for maximum flexibility, with a proven track record of success.

Our team will weigh the pros and cons on a number of these design patterns, seeing which ones we can use to improve our products. Look for more information on the latest design patterns that we will be incorporating into our work in the near future.

For better site performance, manageability and limitless scalability potential, we’ve moved to a new development model known as the N-Layer approach. With this approach, we can create reusable libraries that only need to be defined once for your entire application. The benefits of this approach include greater reusability of code, reduction of development time and reduced bugs.

Using the N-Layer model gives us the ability to work with certain layers of your application without affecting others. In addition it allows us to build on top of pre-existing libraries instead of re-inventing the wheel for each project, ensuring that our latest products are built on a solid, well-tested foundation.

For those who haven’t heard, Google released a new web browser for public beta testing this week. This browser is built around the webkit open source rendering engine, and it incorporates Google’s new JavaScript engine, V8, a new memory management model and a sleek, simple UI.

Chrome’s new JavaScript engine has showcased large performance improvements in early benchmarks, easily topping both Firefox’s and Internet Explorer’s JavaScript performance numbers. The JavaScript engine was built from scratch and actually compiles the JavaScript instead of interpreting the code on the fly, which is the current model used by all browsers. This difference has allowed Google to see large performance improvements.

The new memory management model is also very innovative: instead of treating the entire web browser as one application, Chrome actually views each tab within the browser as a new process. This allows the user to view multiple websites at once, without each website affecting the performance of the other. No longer will your entire browser crash when one website is behaving incorrectly.

Click here to learn more about Google Chrome.

Websites of any size and complexity can benefit from the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). By using CSS, specifically external CSS files, our clients’ websites are more efficient in the following ways: 

Speed and Performance
Defining all site styles in an external CSS file greatly increases website performance. All modern browsers will download the CSS file and cache it for later use, meaning the entire site’s style sheet only needs to be downloaded once to be used for many site visits. This also decreases the size of each webpage. For those users whose browsers support Gzip or Deflate compression; even further performance could be noticed by compressing the stylesheet.

Manageability
Most websites consist of visuals that are repeated throughout the web experience. CSS allows a developer to name a specific element style and re-use that definition throughout the website. This makes it very easy to change the look of an entire website in a short period of time, with only few changes needed.

Standards Compliancy
Properly using CSS allows a website to validate against a CSS validator, creating a “valid” style sheet. Websites with “valid” style sheets are more likely to work correctly across multiple browsers, maintaining a cohesive look.