Matrich

Celebrating CSS Naked Day 2009

Matrich — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:59:53 +0000

Today, I am joining the entire web community to celebrate the CSS Naked Day 2009. The qualification of celebrating the day is having your site has proper semantic markup and since my blog qualifies, then why not. Even with the css disabled, my site is well usable and understandable and that’s what the celebration is about.

The idea behind this event is to promote web standards (like proper semantic markup and a good hierarchy structure). On April 9th, many blogs and sites will strip all CSS during 24 hours (effectively 48 hours for international compliance) and show the content “unstyled” as if no CSS existed.

For more details, visit http://naked.dustindiaz.com/ and in case you got any running websites, you can follow join the celebration.

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Multiple IE Browser Testing - Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview

Matrich — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:16:58 +0000

In all the web developments I do apart from sites based on SharePoint, I always develop using Firefox as a yardstick and after then, I try write a few IE tweaks especially for IE 6 to ensure that it displays the work well. Of course, you may ask yourself why I do this yet IE comes as the default browser of all Microsoft operating systems which definitely I am using. The reasons for this can be found in my post, Multiple IE-Single PC solution - IE Tester, I wrote sometime back and gave a solution of IE Tester.

Most web developers or designers when debugging use either virtual, multiple machines running different versions of IE. Recently, I found out that Microsoft had released a stand-alone tool, Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview, to help in the debugging process by incorporating IE6, IE7 and IE8 into this tool.

Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer is a stand-alone visual debugging tool that makes it faster and easier to migrate your sites from IE6 to IE7 or IE8. With SuperPreview, you can ensure that your Web sites work correctly in IE8 while also maintaining compatibility with earlier versions of IE.

SuperPreview shows your web pages rendered in IE6 and either IE7 or IE8, depending on which version you have installed on your machine. You can view the pages side by side or as an onion-skin overlay and use rulers, guides and zoom/pan tools to precisely identify differences in layout. You can even compare your page comp to how the targeted browsers render the page.

The tool also contains several other interesting things including pointer modes, image viewing, dom highlighting, positioning guides/rulers, layout views, zoom, thumbnail display. The free downloadable tool will only support Internet Explorer and in case you would like other browsers incorporated, you would need to part off with some fee.

For the web developers and designers, this is a great tool for you to test out and use.

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Operating Systems GUI Evolution

Matrich — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:19:45 +0000

As I was traversing the Internet, I found a great post about Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 showing a range of GUI’s that have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh (Mac), Windows, Linux, Symbian OS, over the years.

To me, the most amazing evolution is the one for the famous Macintosh. Mac has been known for great user interfaces and great products like iPhone, iPods, etc. and therefore great to see how their GUIs have evolved.

Check out the details at Webdesigner Depot.

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Free ASP.NET MVC Book Chapter

Matrich — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 07:12:03 +0000

ASP.NET MVC is a new approach for Microsoft developers to use to create dynamic data-driven web sites and follows in the same mold as other platforms such as Rails and Django. Model View Controller (MVC) is relatively a new phenomenon in ASP.NET and it is taking shape though it is kinda difficult for programmers used to the usual WebForms get into the MVC style. I am kinda luck that before I got into ASP.NET programming, I was already using the MVC in some of my web applications using mainly CodeIgniter, a great PHP framework.

Luckily, ScottGu, the Corporate Vice President f Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division has been kind enough and released, free of charge, the first chapter of a new book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 which is still under production.

The chapter walks you through how to build a small but complete application “NerdDinner” using ASP.NET MVC and introduces some of the core concepts behind it. NerdDinner is an Open Source ASP.NET MVC Project that helps nerds and computer people plan, find or organize get-togethers online.

The free chapter download is available at http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvc and the site live at http://www.nerddinner.com. The whole application code is available at CodeProject.

Great thanks to ScottGu and I must say that the application really looks cool which isn’t a common thing with most of the free applications built out there. I have looked at many of them including developer’s blog and I wonder whether these don’t require nice looking interfaces to their applications and interfaces.

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Free Microsoft Press ebooks Offer

Matrich — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:59:00 +0000

For the developers or well-wishers out there into Microsoft programming languages, Microsoft Press recently released Microsoft Press books introducing Visual Studio 2008.

Microsoft Press books deliver the accurate, from-the-source information that you need to take your skills and knowledge to the next level.

There is a free e-book offer where you can some of the chapters from these recent publications:

Programming Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo
Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5 by Dino Esposito
Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2, Second Edition

Have fun with these new technologies as we prepare for those coming up in Visual Studio 2010.

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Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide 2

Matrich — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:29:43 +0000

Lately, I am involved in designing architecture of several applications and planning how the different components of an application should interact with each other and where they should be stored. We work mostly with .NET Framework and I found a great resource of Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 that focuses on designing applications on the .NET framework.

This guide provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the .NET Framework. It focuses on the most common types of applications, partitioning application functionality into layers, components, and services, and walks through their key design characteristics.This guide is a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, product teams, and industry experts.

What a great opportunity to get how something was designed to work from the originators and experts in that field. This should be very valuable to software architects and developers aiming not only to build something which works but building smart applications using the right tools. It is also supplemented with a Video: Train the Trainer - Application Architecture Guide 2.0 which I hope you will enjoy too.

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How to: Solve IE Crashing When Opening SharePoint Documents

Matrich — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:32:59 +0000

Recently, I have been working with SharePoint and I started encountering a problem of both Internet Explorer 6 and 7 crashing whenever I would try to open an Office document in a SharePoint document library.

First, I thought that it was a problem with my IE 6 as I didn’t want to upgrade it for purposes of cross-browser testing. However, even after upgrading to IE 7, I was still getting the same problem which made me conclude that it must be a browser/SharePoint problem. Fortunately, it took me less than two minutes to fix. So what was the problem and how did I fix it?

Cause of the Problem

The problem of Internet Explorer crashing/stop responding is caused by having several different versions of Microsoft Office applications. In my case, I have one application of version 2003 and the rest as 2007.

Solution to the Problem

To solve the problem,

download the 2007 Office hotfix package (KB938888) package from the Microsoft Help and Support website.

For more details about this problem, visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888

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Web Development Project Estimator

Matrich — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:35:12 +0000

Many times, designers and developers are contacted by clients directly or indirectly to develop applications, websites, web applications, etc. and yet these clients have no idea of what they exactly want or even what they should expect after the project.

Surprisingly, most of them always ask for the costs which will be involved to complete the project. Of course, to a client, it is not a surprise but to a designer/developer, details of the project are needed to determine if he/she would like to take on the project and obviously to estimate the cost.

The Web Development Project Estimator is a good tool which a designer/developer can roughly use to estimate the cost to help you out with this complexity.

From the tool website,

The Web Development Project Estimator is a simple tool that allows web designers and site developers to quickly and thoroughly estimate the time and materials required for a proposed web project.

To use, simply enter the title of the project and your default hourly rate. Then adjust your anticipated hours accordingly to generate your total project estimate. When finished, you can view your finalized estimate in a print-ready format in case you’d like to save a PDF or print a copy for your records.

Feel free to check it out and suggest any other tool or challenges you face as a developer/designer/consultant. The tool can be used for any other ~~development~~ sort of project you’ve got to estimate the total costs.

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Matrich Memories 2008

Matrich — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:28:22 +0000

It is again the end of year 2008 and I am really grateful to God for His Mercy & Grace over my life. Every year seems to be incredibly more of a testimony having God do lots of great things in my life. I can’t say I am the rightest guy or I have everything I need but for sure, I have seen God move in my life and He has continuously shown Himself both in hard and easy times.

Among several things, it is in this year that I made a year or so of freelancing, travelled to the Netherlands for an academic tour which was terrific, completed all the three semesters of my MSc course, began off my research proposals and joined the biggest telecom in Uganda, MTN Uganda as Analyst Solutions Architecture. All this and many more, I attribute them to God, The Almighty for He is faithful and worthy.

As I await for the new year, so much is awaiting for me BUT I know ALL WILL BE WELL THROUGH CHRIST WHO STRENGTHENS ME.

Great thanks to all who have impacted my life including my dad, mum and family; friend George Appiah and many others for their tremendous support. May God richly bless you all.

To all my fans and well wishers, I wish you a PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR and God Bless You All. Off to church… till next year

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How To: Solve “Cannot add Library” Problem (ArrayIndexOutOfBounds) in Netbeans on Vista

Matrich — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:21:52 +0000

Netbeans IDE is one of the famous IDEs used by Java and other programmers and it is especially very good when you are creating graphical user interfaces (GUI) applications.

Lately, I have been working on a java project and I have been facing a problem with using Netbeans on my Microsoft Windows Vista to add external libraries to the project. Normally external libraries are packaged as .jar files.

Whenever I try to click the Add JAR/Folder button as on the screenshot above, instead of getting the Open File dialog, I was getting a java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException error.

Source of the Problem

This is exception is mainly caused because of some incompatibilities issues of the JDK you are using and Microsoft Vista. To be more specific, the java file chooser dialog using WindowsLookAndFeel is incompatible with Ms. Windows Vista on any Java release less than 1.5.0_11 caused by some changes made by Microsoft in Ms. Windows Vista.

Solution to the Problem

To solve this problem,

Update your JDK to JDK 6 and above

Ensure that your Netbeans IDE uses the new updated JDK instead of the previous JDK which has been upgraded.