Developer's Corner - Resources for Developers

Choosing a web color scheme

Antonio Bello — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 09:41:51 GMT

When designing a web site, on of the problems I face with is how to choose colors. Usually I choose a base color, which is the predominant color used in the web design, but how to choose other colors, such as background, headings, panels, borders and so on?

My favorite tools for web design are Photoshop and Expression Design 2, plus Expression Web 2 and TopStyle for CSS/HTML editing. Topstyle has a nice feature in its color picker: given a color it suggests the complementary color

and the harmonious colors:

Basics of color theory

The opposite or complementary color is defined in wikipedia as "the color that is of opposite hue in some color model". Given a color wheel, and chosen a color, the opposite color is the one at the opposite side of the wheel. For example, the opposite color of the red in the following wheel is the green:

If you are wondering what a color wheel is, it's a set of colors hues around a circle. The nice thing about the color wheel is that theoretically any set of colors chosen from the color wheel "will look good together". Harmonious colors are colors having a fixed relation in the color wheel. For instance, a square color harmony is made up of four colors equally spaced in the color wheel:

There are several other color schemas, such as complementary, triadic and rectangular.

I don't want to discuss further on color theory as honestly I don't feel an expert in this area. There are better resources to look for more info, just google for "color theory" and you will get several valuable introductions.

Back to TopStyle and introduction to color schemer tools

After this very brief introduction to color theory, let's get back to TopStyle, the CSS/HTML editor. While using it, I wondered: isn't there any tool to help me choose a good color scheme? The answer is, of course, yes. There are several tools, most of them are web based and free, others are downloadable and installable products, usually commercial products. As a matter of preference, I like to work with tools installed on my workstation, even if I have to pay a price, and if the tool is worth the price I pay for. So, after googling, trying and discarding several products, I came to the one I currently use.

Its name is ColorImpact, a features-rich application providing a color wheel to choose the colors from, plus a set of other useful tools I'm going to describe.

At program startup the main window displays a set op options to start with, including a useful set of links about color theory. The left sidebar contains the color chooser and the right sidebar contains the color palette, where we are able to save the colors we choose. At bottom right there is a color inspector, displaying info about the color currently under the mouse cursor in any of the application tools.

The largest toolbar at top of the window contains a set of buttons to quickly access all tools, such as the color wheel, a color variations tool, and so on.

The Color Wheel

The color wheel is used to select a color harmony. But first a base color should be chosen. ColorImpact provides three different tools to select a color: a wheel, a rectangle and a web safe palette.

The one I like more is the interactive color wheel: by simply clicking the small circle and dragging around the wheel we can select a select a color, and by moving along the radius we can choose a different graduation. During the process of color selection, the color wheel displays the chosen color along with the harmonic colors. Once we're satisfied with our base color, we can choose a color harmony schema selecting from a list available at the bottom center.

If, for instance, we choose the Square color harmony, we'll see the four equally spaced colors in the color wheel highlighted.

Colors displayed in the wheel, as well as in any of the tools described below, can be saved in the color palette toolbox docked at the right side of the main window, either by double clicking a color on the tool currently in use or dragging a color and dropping into the palette . We have the option of creating multiple palettes, if we need to organize colors in different sets.

Other tools

ColorImpact provides not just a color wheel and the ability to choose a color harmony schema, but several other useful tools which greatly helps in the process of selecting colors and variations.

The Advanced Color Wheel displays a color wheel similar to the one displayed in the Color Harmonies tool, but in addition it provides different hues in inner circles of the wheel. It's possible to configure the wheel to display variations from dark to light and vice versa, and from current hues to either darker or lighter variations, more or less saturated, cooler and warmer.

The Color Formulae provides a list of colors based on a predefined formula selectable from a list of 30 in the drop down list at bottom of the tool page. For each formula a brief description helps us figuring out what's the relation among colors displayed by the tool. Examples of formulas are different hues variations, monochromatic variations, geometrical variations (such as square, rectangle), complementary, and so on.

Using the Color Variations tool we are able to display different color variations, such as darker and lighter, from dark to light and vice versa, more or less saturated, and other combinations.

The Color Blender, as it name implies, provides a list of variations of a color blending into another. Starting and ending colors can be chosen by either using the wheel tool (or any of the color picker tools) or by dragging a color from the palette and dropping into one of the ends

The last tool is the Test Pattern, an undoubtedly useful way of previewing our color palettes and see how colors look when mixed together. There are several test patterns our colors can be tested with, and probably the most interesting to web designers is the Web Page pattern, available in 2 different variations.

Using the Test Pattern tool we are able to drag colors from the palette and drop into any of the web page elements. Once we have applied our colors, we can see how our color schema looks like. There are several other test patterns, such as Fashion (displayed below), type designs, shapes and circles.

One of the coolest things about test patterns is that we can create our own, using Flash MX. On the website there is a brief tutorial describing how to create a custom test pattern and adding it to the list of test patterns.

Import and Export

I can's say that a tool like ColorImpact is useless without import and export features, because I'd still benefit from using it even manually copying color values. But having such features is a plus (other than a must for most people). Although import is limited to XML and Color Schemer (a similar tool for choosing color schemes), ColorImpact is able to export into any of the following formats:

Image containing the list of colors along with their hexadecimal values (gif, bmp, jpg, png, windows metafile and enhanced metafile)
Text file, listing all color names and values
HTML Spec Sheet, an html page displaying colors and color values
CSS
ACT Color Table
Paint Shop Pro palette
Photoshop color palette
Illustrator color palette
Freehand ACF palette

Additional tools

Other than the important tools described so far, there are some other minor features making life easier when selecting colors. With the eye dropper tool we can select a color from any point of the desktop or any open window, with the additional ability to get either the exact color or an average of its surrounding area

With the color blindness simulation we can simulate how our colors set will be seen by color blindness people.

The random color tool simply generates a random color.

Conclusions

As mentioned earlier, once I realized that there are tools specifically targeted to simplify color schemes selection, I have tried several tools. In the process of selecting the most appropriate tool I took into account several aspects, such as user friendliness, number of features, exporting capabilities. The tool at the 2nd place of my personal favorite list is Color Schemer, which I didn't like for just one thing, very important to me: it runs on a fixed sized window, too small in my opinion, also considering that I'm used to work with high resolution monitors, such as my 15,4" 1920x1200 laptop display.

ColorImpact implements all the features required to easily and quickly choose web color schemes, also providing unique features I haven't seen in other applications. So, I can't do anything else than suggesting to whoever reads this blog post to give it a try - you'll like it. A 15 days trial version can be downloaded at the following address:

http://www.tigercolor.com/Download/Default.htm

ZoneAlarm beta for Vista x64

Antonio Bello — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:18:48 GMT

This is a good news for all of you, just like me, thinking that Zone Alarm is the best available firewall. I've been using ZoneAlarm for years, until I had to install Vista 64 on my Lenovo T61p, and discover that ZoneAlarm is not compatible. In fact, until now, ZoneAlarm was compatible with 32 bits platforms only.

Spammer complaining with me because I reported his spamming activities

Antonio Bello — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:28:44 GMT

This is really funny.

I've reported thousands of spam emails to ISP and domain registrars, but this is the first time I get contacted by the spammer complaining with me because I waste my time filing complaints against him.

Platform Verification Task leading to slow builds on compact framework projects

Antonio Bello — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:39:02 GMT

I've been experiencing an extremely high build time on a windows mobile project targeted to compact framework 2.0 before finding out what was responsible of such slowness. Fortunately solving this problem is as easy as adding a line to a configuration file.

Unit testing of ASP.NET pages, Http Handlers and Http modules

Antonio Bello — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 06:03:47 GMT

Simple framework to run asp.net pages without a web server, useful for running self contained tests.

Data integrity check using hashing

Antonio Bello — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:50:12 GMT

When data are moved across a network the recipient might require a verification to ensure that data have not been modified after send. For example, in a client/server scenario where a client application sends some updates to a remote database via a web service, the web service might need to verify that data have not been modified while travelling across the network, either due to corruption or because somebody changed them. A simple way to implement such kind of verification is utilizing hashing.

DotNetNuke SMS Module under development (again)

Antonio Bello — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:08:34 GMT

I know, this is not the first time I announce the development of a DNN SMS Module. But this time I really started its development, and I’m currently working on a provider-independent SMS engine, able to send SMS using virtually any SMS Gateway or SMS-C (Short Message Service Center, the mobile operator’s hardware responsible of accepting, routing and delivering SMS messages), although at beginning I am going to implement the Aspsms provider only. Once the SMS engine is completed, I’ll start working on the DNN module, which at beginning will enable a group of users to send SMS. Next I will add more features and more providers, basing on the received input.

I will soon probably need about 10 beta testers who can help me testing the module before its official release. Being a commercial module, beta testers will be rewarded with a discount on the final price, although I haven’t decided a price yet.

Stay tuned. And for any question or comment please use this forum.

Mark a C# class data member as readonly when it’s read only

Antonio Bello — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:25:29 GMT

2009.01.30 - Updated in order to clarify about immutability.

The readonly modifier is used to declare an instance-specific constant data member which can be initialized in the class constructor and is not limited to compiler-time constants only.

Casting from a base class to a derived class

Antonio Bello — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:23:00 GMT

Today a friend of mine asked me how to cast from List<> to a custom MyCollection class, where MyCollection is derived from List<>. Is this possible?

Creating icons the easy way

Antonio Bello — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 06:23:00 GMT

Recently, I've been looking for an easy way to create icons and some web graphic. I don't consider myself a graphic designer, but I like to experiment with creating some cool graphic, often with not satisfactory results.

The state of the art tool every good designer uses is, of course, Photoshop. But in order to take advantage of its huge power it requires constant usage, knowledge of the hundreds of functions it has - and from my point of view its learning curve is not trivial. I think I know and I am able to use no more than 10% of its power...

A few weeks ago I found a product which suits my needs: creating icons, either 2D and 3D, creating 3D models, render images and much more. The name of this product is RealWorld Icon Editor.

Free Requirements Management demo application

Antonio Bello — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:49:00 GMT

It's available for download the Requirements Management demo application I mentioned a while ago.

This is a demo application I wrote to familiarize with the kind of UI and features I plan to include in the biggest project ActiReq I'm currently working on.

DNN SMS Module - Do you want to get involved?

Antonio Bello — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 07:28:00 GMT

In the latest couple of months I've seen lot of interest in the DotNetNuke SMS module I planned to develop, but later I had to stop its development (although still at a very early stage) because busy on other activities.

Also, I previously started the development of a Requirements Management application (code name ActiReq), which had and still has higher priority.

Due to interest shown on the SMS module, I'm thinking of getting my hands again on it - but I'm afraid that I won't be able to dedicate enough time to release a version in realistic timeframes. If there is anybody interested in partecipating in its development, please let me know, by leaving a message either here or better in the dedicated forum.

Free Datagrid for WPF from Xceed

Antonio Bello — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 06:44:00 GMT

Xceed has developed a professional looking data grid for WPF (Windows Presentation Framework), offered for free

ActiReq: Software Requirements Management application under development

Antonio Bello — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:42:00 GMT

I'm currently working on a Software Requirements Management application for Windows, targeted to stakeholders involved in the software requirements gathering process.

The code name of this application is ActiReq, I might change it in the future, but I still have no plan about it, as well as no plans about its first release (although I hope to be able to release the 1st version within the end of the year).

More details will follow soon, including a list of features that I plan to implement, some screenshots, and a free mockup application I wrote just to familiarize myself with the kind of UI I want and some minimal features.

For any comment or suggestion, please either write a comment below or use the dedicated forum available here

oDesk: fees lowered from 30% to 10%

Antonio Bello — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 08:53:00 GMT

oDesk is an online marketplace where people who need custom software development can find and hire developers

I made a quick review of the oDesk service here. My main concern about this service is that it's quite hard to get jobs if your hourly rate is higher than 15$.

Very surprisingly, they have cut off their fees from 30$ to 10$ - from now on it will be a bit easier for people with higher hourly rates to get a project using their services.

Click here to read the announcement.

New design, new skin

Antonio Bello — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 16:35:00 GMT

As you may have noticed, I've applied a new skin to the website.

The old one was too confusing and heavy in terms of overall page size, so I started working on a brand new skin with 2 top objectives:

keep it as simple as possible in terms of page size
give a more clear view to the site

Feel free to add your comments about this skin.

Test Web Designs on multiple browsers

Antonio Bello — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 06:49:00 GMT

If you need to test your web design on a range of browsers, instead of doing it manually, since it would be hard to have different browsers on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac), just go to browsershots.org.

This nice service simply allows you to insert an url, and it returns a set of screenshots taken from more than 30 different browsers, such as Firebird, Firefox, Konqueror, Mozilla, Navigator, Opera on Linux, Safari on Mac, Firefox, IE 6 & 7, Netscape, Mozilla on Windows

Give it a look!!

SMS Module for DotNetNuke

Antonio Bello — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 05:43:00 GMT

I've started working on a new DotNetNuke module which allows users to send SMS.

This module is still at an early pre-development stage, in other words I'm collecting requirements and writing analysis. Hence, by now I have no estimations regarding development time and expected release date. As soon as I'm able to do a release plan, I will post a new message here.

Click on read more to read about planned features

oDesk: How to find an employer without being employed

Antonio Bello — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:03:00 GMT

oDesk is an online marketplace where people who need custom software development can find developers, and developers get paid on an hourly basis.

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Antonio Bello — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 06:05:00 GMT

At last Microsoft has released a set of developer tools integrated with Internet Explorer, whose name is Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

As its name says, it's a toolbar which provides a set of useful tools, such as:

document object model (DOM) explorer
ruler to align and measure objects in the web page
quick access menu to clear browser cache and cookies
resizer, to quickly change the browser width and height
image size, path and alternate text displayer
online validator
outliner, which adds a border to tables, cells, images, divs

and more.

It's still at a beta stage, but I think it is worth to have a look and install it. You can download it here.

New look, new modules

Antonio Bello — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 10:45:00 GMT

Well, not really a new look at container/skin level.

Anyway I've installed the excellent Scott McCulloch's News Articles module, a low cost module offered on a subscription basis for $35/year, along with all other modules he has developed

This module is so powerful and flexible that I've decided to replace the Blogs module which comes with dotnetnuke

The old blogs page will be online for a while, just to avoid problems with search engines, but it will soon disappear from the menu, and no longer updated. From now on all blogs will be added to this page and using this module

Skin & Containers completed

Antonio Bello — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:06:00 GMT

I've completed and uploaded the skin and 2 containers for the site.
The overall look doesn't change, I've just reworked due to problems with Opera and Firefox.
Layout of both skin and containers are (almost) entirely made using CSS only. The only exception is a table used to organize the 3 columns for the skin, since I haven't been able to find a good solution using CSS only - the main problem being the height of the columns not synchronized with the footer, so that if the left or right column is higher than the content pane, they are displayed over the footer.... not good.

Working on dotnetnuke skin

Antonio Bello — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 10:09:00 GMT

In the latest days I haven't added any content to the site since I've been busy with reworking on the current dnn skin.
Such work consists of fixing a few issues with Opera and Firefox browsers, along with redevelopment of containers.

Although DNN doesn't use CSS for layout, I'm trying to create skin and containers using CSS layout formatting only. Not simple, but I'm at a good stage and I should complete the work within the end of the week.
While working, I tought that I should write a tutorial for creating dotnetnuke skins and containers - maybe also a tutorial for using CSS to design layouts, with no usage of s. There are several benefits of doing so, such as accessibility and separation of content from presentation.

Stay tuned!!

Still problems with the site hosting

Antonio Bello — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 00:08:00 GMT

Site down once again. I don't know whether it's a problem with dotnetnuke 4 or not.

Prior of installing dotnetnuke 4.x I hosted my company web site using dotnetnuke 3.x, and I had no problem with it.

Last month I decided to move to dnn 4, so I made a new installation, and contextually I've started this new web site, Developer's Corner. But since its installation I've often experienced slowness, timeouts, server errors, etc. Since this hasn't happened before, I presume it could be dnn4.

At present I'm trying to install dnn 3.x and see if the problems still persists. If the test is positive, I'll move the entire site on this installation, and I'll definitevely remove dnn 4.

Is there anybody who had problems with dnn 4 in a shared web-hosting environment?

In the latest 24 hours the site has been offline due to technical problems

Antonio Bello — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 07:12:00 GMT

Due to still unknown reasons the site has been down in the latest 24 hours.

It seems that DotNetNuke, the open source CMS used to implement Developer's Corner, had some problems.

But I also noticed that the web hosting provider had problems, since my company website Elapsus hasn't worked properly in the latest hours.

Or maybe DotNetNuke has caused the web server to crash or something like that.

Well, in this cases it's hard to figure out what's happened. I hope it won't happen again :)

Antonio

How to fight against spamming

Antonio Bello — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:04:00 GMT

I receive about 20 spam messages in my mailbox every day. I know this can be considered a low number, since I know of users receiving hundreds of spam, with a variety of subjects, ranging from porn sites to viagra, medicines, casino, software, etc.

I wonder how can these spammers think that I'm so stupid to use my credit card to buy their products - but indeed I'm afraid that if they persist in their illegal business is because there are people who buy from them.

Anyway, what can we do to fight against them? There are several services which detect messages and prevent them from reaching our mail client, and mail client add-ons which move suspect messages into a spam folder, so that we don't have to waste time reading messages we aren't interested in. But is this a good way to fight spammers? Do they prevent spammers from sending you emails if you don't buy from them? Unfortunately I don't think so.

What can we do? Report spam.

Microsoft Empower: how to get MSDN at a low cost

Antonio Bello — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 10:21:00 GMT

I presume that everybody knows what MSDN is, and how much it costs - it's not exactly what I define a cheap product, but it is undoubtedly of great value, since it includes all Microsoft development tools, and it's a must have for any developer involved in the Microsoft technologies.

Not everybody knows about the Empower Program, a MSDN-like subscription offered at the very low fee of 375 USD, which includes software for development, testing and internal business use along with 5 user licenses. The program is available in almost all the countries, with different prices (usually higher) outside US.

Of course, this program is subject to a set of requirements:

limited to 1 year only, renewable for a second year only
available once per company
being a registered member of the Microsoft Partner Program (registration is free)
having a company's web site
development of a reusable software application supporting one of the required technologies

The program is equivalent to the Visual Studio Professional + MSDN Premium subscription (formerly MSDN Universal), which includes almost everything, but it doesn't include Visual Studio Team editions - in fact, Visual Studio 2005 professional only is included.

How to better appreciate your most preferred language

Antonio Bello — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 06:24:00 GMT

Is Java better than C#, C# better than C++, C++ better than Java? Are open sources technologies better than vendor specific technologies?

I've seen a lot of developers telling that Linux is better than Windows, C# is better than Java, Delphi is better than VC++, and so on. But if you ask them if they know the other language they are comparing with, they say no.

I was one of them, since I believed that the best IDE was Delphi, the best platform was Windows, and the best language was C++. At least, until I started working on "real projects" and not on applications made just for fun. When I had to learn Java and use it to develop server applications on Sun platforms, I started to appreciate the language and the Unix-like environments.... and I started to believe that these technologies were better than those I thought were the best. Soon I realized that every technology is the best, depending on where it is applied.

Learning by using

Antonio Bello — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 19:04:00 GMT

Before using a new language or technology, we need to know what we are working with. What if we have no time to learn?