Exception Management in .Net A small piece from MS patterns and practices. The book needs a little updating; it says stuff like "derive custom exceptions from ApplicationException". I know MS says derive from System.Exception now.

MS Press, a free download from the patters site. Interesting until it started talking about logging with Enterprise Infrastructure Framework. Yes, it got boring at that point because I don't have it installed. Completed the book the following day after falling asleep though its a little over 30 pages. Referred me to other resources a bit too much but its still a good book if you are really bothered about how to handle exceptions correctly. Free books don't hurt when u can derive at least some useful info.  ¶ 3:31 PM 0 comments

  User Interface Design for Programmers Written by the don Joel Spolsky, a man whose judgements I have come to respect a lot.
Apress Books (2001).
The most refreshing book I have read since Head First design patterns. The stories are short and sweet in the traditional Joel way. His judgements are largely unbiased. He explored the beauty of using tab controls correctly, probably a guiding force for Office 2007's new tabbed approach its common user interface. He critized those mundane windows wizards that asked questions I called my brother to answer then. Why ask a user to minimize database size or pick another option, I just want to search dude!
I particularly agree with designing some user interface the common office user interface way; arguably over 90% users of Windows are already familiar with the same UI and will expect to find an exit menu under File. And true, Microsoft spends a lot on usability tsting, by the way Joel should know as he wwas former program manager for Excel.
I have listed a couple of usability changes I would like included in ourEMR application.

1. Most recently accessed patients because users don't remember


2. Less intimidating dialog boxes because users can't read


3. some more interesting and suggestive icons, to serve as real world metaphors


4. Change the save key from ctrl + C (this is a nasty one) to ctrl + S. This ensures users are in charge and have more control. Its also the general windows way, what were they thinking of when they asked for that key combination. Oh its embarasing I implemented that!

A lot more stuff on web design, he canvassed those good old suggestive 3D push buttons, links with normal behaviour and some truly interesting stories.

Did Joel truly work in that bakery?, the things people do for survival.  ¶ 3:02 PM 0 comments

  Designing Data Tier Components and Passing Data through Tiers MS Press: Collaborators: Luca Bolognese, Mike Pizzo, Keith Short, Martin Petersen-Frey (PSS), Pablo De Grande, Bernard Chen (Sapient), Dimitris Georgakopoulos (Sapient),
Kenny Jones, Chris Brooks, Lance Hendrix, Chris Schoon, and Franco Ceruti (VBNext).

This is one of the great books that caused me to make a routine of visiting the Microsoft patterns and practices website .A straight 70 pages, appendix, introduction and all inclusive. I had to put a copy on the community site too.
Before reading the book, I design data tier somewhat close to the ideas in the book, but I had a lot of questions in my mind regarding certain decisions. why can't I just pass a dataset here instead of an Arraylist? How about XSD schemas or just plain XML for business entities, it seems to make sense here. Ok, what about the CRUD methods, should I add them to my business entities or keep this strictly to my data access logic? What if I have a custom ORM?
The book mentions the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Buchao! MS Press.  ¶ 3:02 PM 0 comments