I was pointed to this website, http://www.useit.com, over the weekend. One of my favorite parts about it is the science behind how to build good sites. In a recent post, eye tracking technology recorded how people read websites. People are most likely to use a pattern shaped like an "F".

Eye trackers are getting popular. Macolm Gladwell talked about them in one of his books too. They tracked how small children watch TV, which led to better shows for Sesame Street and Blues Clues.

Anecdotes are fun, but I'm more satisfied when I can see real facts like this.

So they had the ASP.Net Connections conference in Florida a few days ago. I'd love to go to that next time around.

The Telerik team chatted it up with Scott Guthrie during one of the parties. I'm convinced we're heading in the right direction at Pop Art. This post by Telerik has some good indicators and evidence. I wonder what Microsoft has in mind for easing CSS editing in the next product release. Sounds delightful.

So I'm writing this little program that calls web services from BaseCamp. I'm creating some functionality that exports milestone lists to Microsoft Excel. Anyone who is particularly fond of Excel can then make any necessary edits, then upload the changes back into BaseCamp.

There's not much to the Excel query, so long as you know what your doing. This post helped quite a bit with the necessary code to issue select queries on Excel documents.

Right now I'm importing and exporting in ASP.Net using the wizard control to step through the process. I'm thinking this could also be a reasonable Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project too. Ahhh, its only Friday night, and I've got all weekend to tinker. Yay!

We had a bit of a false alarm starting about 30 hours ago. Microsoft is releasing an update through their normal means that will alter the way Flash and similar ActiveX technologies render in Internet Explorer. Its due to legal action; but that part of the issue is not relevant here. The facts, as I believe them to be today at 1:35pm, Pacific are as follows:

• Microsoft announced the intended action in December, 2005.
• On February 10, 2006, Microsoft made a preview of the update, indexed as 912945, so ISVs and corporations could test the behavior. It was not included in the Windows Automatic Updates feature. Windows users would only have this patch installed if they manually installed it, or their system administrator pushed it onto their machine.
• On April 11, 2006, Microsoft released a patch, indexed as 912812, that cancels (reverts) the ActiveX behavior change made in 912945. This release, 912812, was distributed up by the Windows Automatic Update feature as a High Priority update.
• The June, 2006 update cycle will include a patch that will perminently change the behavior of the ActiveX controls, like 912945 exhibits. This patch will likely be distributed by the Windows Automatic Update feature as a High Priority update.

The false alarm started when a rumor started that Microsoft had released the June patch early. We mistakenly assumed that 912812 was the behavior altering patch that would destroy some websites due to the lack of preparation on our part.

I'm reminded of a saying that my friend's dad says: "I thought I was wrong once, and that was when I thought I was wrong."

It never really sat well with me when I heard the rumor. There are corporations that spend millions of dollars with Microsoft, and they probably have significant interests at stake here. I couldn't account for the apparent no-warning deployment of a significant behavior change. Especially when they said the deployment would be in June. It didn't follow the historical pattern of my experiences with Microsoft.

I read the 912812 article over and over. About the tenth or fifteenth time, it finally struck me. By the time my eyes got to the meat of the article, they were so glazed over that I had been skipping the most imporant facts. The rumors had brainwashed me and I was reading what I wanted to see, not was was printed on the document.

This text is the important part:

Microsoft is releasing a Compatibility Patch on April 11, 2006. As soon as it is deployed, the Compatibility Patch will temporarily return Internet Explorer to the previous functionality for handling ActiveX controls. This Compatibility Patch will function until an Internet Explorer update is released as part of the June update cycle, at which time the changes to the way Internet Explorer handles ActiveX controls will be permanent.

So that's pretty clear. The 4/11 patch, 912812, is the compatibility patch and it returns the previous functionality for a short time. It should have been written better. Its still hard to decifier without a good mental picture of the issues.

Now, to be clear, I could be wrong and I will continue some cross checking, but this is what I believe at this moment.

I've occassionally sent email to the wrong address. Its to the right person, just the wrong account. When I open Outlook and create a new email message, the handy autocomplete feature lets me type just a few letters of the person's name and it shows me the matching entries. If I don't look really close, I sometimes send email to Dave's personal account, instead of his business account. That sucks, especially when its important, and he doesn't see it for a while.

Google to the rescue.

A quick Googling, and I had the answer to my problem in about 30 seconds.

http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2005/09/clearing_your_m.html

I figured out how to clear my autocomplete cache in Outlook. I rarely send email to Dave's personal account, so now I can start fresh!

Yay.

Over the weekend, I was playing in a sandbox, working out some ideas for our client, PICA.

I was really impressed with all of the out-of-the-box functionality available in ASP.Net 2.0, specifically these:

• Personalization
• Membership
• Menu Control
• Security Trimming
• Two Way Data Binding

I was able to build a full app, albeit wanting of some CSS love, in about four hours time.

The site shows a few pages of content. It lists some events that were created in a password protected part of the site. The events can be added to a cart and "bought" by a user by clicking a dynamic link to PayPal. The user's cart is persisted via cookies if they come back later. The user's cart is also migrated to a persistant data source if they decide to authenticate. The menu of the site uses the asp.net menu control and it has a nice "Security Trimming" feature that omits any items in the site map that the given user doesn't have access to view.

These features really let me focus on the core business problem, rather than getting bogged down by plumbing and implementation details. The number of new features in ASP.Net 2.0 is huge and a little overwhelming, but I'm starting to wrap my arms around it, after months of reading. I really dig it.

Here's a great list of shortcuts available using the Windows Key.

Nice.

So I picked up a copy of Professional ASP.Net a few weeks ago and I'm really digging it. Wrox Press has usually done a great job of explaining new technologies and ideas to me, and this book is no exception. I've been reading chapters in my own preferred order, starting with databinding and moving into profiling and membership.

At the end of each chapter my grin just keeps getting wider. I can't believe all of the features that we have available in ASP.Net 2.0, like creating a membership system in about 10 minutes, perhaps in 60 seconds if I study hard enough.

For example, ASP.Net has several authorization and authentication controls that can be dragged onto a webpage from the toolbar. One control contains a prebuilt set of fields to enable a user to register for an account. Another control enables a user to login to the site, another control for resetting a forgotten password, and a couple others. Each control handles all of the internal business logic and database access. It even creates the appropriate database tables. It's a true out-of-the-box situation, AND they're all skinable which lets me pass the buck to our great CSS folks.

Since version 1.0, ASP.Net has been moving in a direction that handles so much of the internal plumbing that most systems need which lets me focus on the real business problem of the day. I love it!

Here's a fun post that applies to a lot of situations.

When we build software, a common part of the conversation is "Will this be useful elsewhere?" and "If so, what should I do now to make it useful elsewhere?"

Over the past year or so, I'm feeling very comfortable with the camp that says this as its core political platform:

• Let the "elsewhere's" starve
• Solve your own problem today, on time and on budget
• Make your solution simple and elegant

I have absolutely no qualms about refactoring code next week based on what I learn this week. I cringe at the software bloating and rambling discussions consuming precious time when today's problem is still unsolved. I'm really happy when the discussion of the day is on today's real problems.

Ok, so I'm behind on my RSS Aggregator. Brad Abrams has a reference to another gem.

Atlas Webcast

Always a pain, and certainly a concern with Atlas.

Here's a reference by Brad Abrams. Looks like VS.Net can be our friend here.