On episode #41 of the Stack Overflow Podcast Jeff and Joel discussed GUI ideologies that lead to poor usability. What GUI toolkits have you seen that most beneficially influence the programmers that use them? What level of separation (between user-interface and implementation) do you find most efficient for testability and usability? ...
I have a Rails application that I'm in the process of designing. I have a separate model that needs to link to only 2 of one model. Specifically, my "evaluation"s have 2 "member"s, an evaluator, and an evaluatee. They also have a few other pieces of information, too but they should not be relevant to this. What is the best way to r...
Hello, I am writing a simulation and need some hint on the design. The basic idea is that data for the given stochastic processes is being generated and later on consumed for various calculations. For example for 1 iteration: Process 1 -> generates data for source 1: x1 Process 2 -> generates data for source 1: x2 and so on Later...
I'm using Visual Studio 2005 and drop down box has 3 drop down styles 'simple', 'dropdown' and 'dropdown list'. My drop down box doesn't allow the user to enter a value it contains a fixed number of selectable items. I've been setting the style to 'drop down list' as this doesn't allow editing but I noticed that Microsoft uses 'drop down...
Hi, I'm working on a .net portal which would be having lots of concurrent users. so scalability,performance need to be addressed in the design and architecture. We plan to use load balancing in the application. Keeping this in mind,what would be the best way of communicating between IIS web server(hosting aspx,aspx.cs files) and applic...
I have a business logic layer (the "repository") which is exposed as a set of .NET interfaces backed by swappable concrete implementations. Originally I had this business layer implement authentication and authorization (authn/authz), meaning I had interfaces such as IUserIdentity and IUserRole, and all methods that accessed sensitive d...
In my continuing quest to try and wrap my mind around RESTful-ness, I've come to another place where I'm not sure how to proceed. I set up a thought expiriment for myself where I'd design a simple voting system for a resource, much like how SO allows voting on questions. So, say my resource is an image, and I can get an image by an ID, l...
I have a particular problem I'm not sure how to approach. Here at the office there is this large unwieldy XSLT we have for adapting one type of XML to another. The problem is that it's not very consistently written and very difficult to follow. In the ancient creation of this stylesheet, it seems it was forgotten exactly what it does. ...
I will start developing my next desktop application in about a month. In the past I have delivered functional software that hasn't wowed anyone, including myself, in the usability or aesthetics department. Does anybody know of any resources or guides or even books that could showcase examples of good design in desktop software? There s...
I'm designing an api and I'd like to allow users and groups to have saved searches, but am uncertain how to best expose this information. I've come up with a few URI's to expose them: # These are for CRUD the search definitions, not running the searches 1. /users/{username}/searches # lists the searches for a user 2. /users/{username}/...
Hello, guys I am working on a so-called Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), a web query system dealing with questionnaires coming every year. I had hard time in coming up with a suitable database design for it. Here is the problem: Each questionnaire contains about 80 questions, with demographic info, e.g. age, educati...
How would someone join two classes each with independant inheritance trees to bridge context boundaries, given the restrictions that nether class's inheritance trees can be modified to inherit from the other ie if a item that is an entity saved to a database lets say public class Stockitem : StockItemBase { ... } needs to be display...
I need to design a Data access layer DAL .Net Enterprise library version 3.5 Data access application block (DAAB) In my application,I've various logical modules like Registration, billing, order management, user management,etc Am using C# business entities to map the module objects to database tables and then return the List collection ...
I would like to force subclasses to implement the singleton pattern. I originally thought of having an abstract static property in the parent class, but upon closer though, that didn't make sense (abstract requires and instance). Next, I thought of having an interface with a static property, but that also doesn't make sense (interfaces...
If I use this code, the image isn't clipped by the div's rounded corners (resulting in the image's square corners covering up the div's rounded ones): <div style="border-radius: 1em; -moz-border-radius: 1em; -webkit-border-radius: 1em; overflow:hidden;"> <img src="big-image.jpg" /> </div> Does anyone know how to get a rounded cord...
Hello. We have a pretty big application here and I considering to refactor it a little bit to follow DDD guys guidance. For now the number one issue with it is Bounded Contexts and Context Maps. Maybe I just don't grok it, but it seems to me just impossible to do division. For example we have User object all over the place and it's exa...
I noticed this project (pitz) that is being written first with the documentation, then tests, and finally code. Has anyone else tried this "Documentation driven design" and if so, what are your experiences with it? ...
My company is starting a large scale web application, and I'd like to hire a designer to help with some of the pages (to create our general template, look/feel, and control set). Where is the best place to find a designer with some knowledge of usability? Would we be best looking on elance.com (or similar sites), or is there a better a...
Ok I've got a bit of an interesting problem on my hands. Here's a bit of background: I'm writing a media library service implementation that will serve URLs to a front end flash player. The client wants to be able to push content into the service by uploading files with some metadata into an FTP folder - I have control of the metadata s...
Background: I have a web application for which I need to do database auditing for insert/deletes/updates (and maybe reads). I use LINQ as my ORM. Using some ideas I found on the web I've come up with a way of using attributes to decorate my entities which have associated audit tables. The audit table itself is required to include th...