Filemon and Regmon

I cannot recommend these utilities enough. Absolutely superb.

They've come in especially useful this last week when debugging configuration issues for Asp.Net applications.

Filemon watches disk access from applications. It presents a list of all the file system events that happen whilst it is monitoring, and was very helpful in showing me a directory on the machine that the aspnet worker process was trying to access, but did not have sufficient rights to, causing an error to occur whenever an asp.net application was launched. The error message itself was unhelpful.

Regmon was similarly useful, as it monitors registry access. Having it monitoring while an application was being started showed me the exact key in the registry that the aspnet_wp.exe process was trying to access, and failing.

Utilities like these are so useful. Not only do they give you a better idea of what is happening on your machine, but they also free you from being so reliant on Google :-)

And they are free.

Available from:

http://www.sysinternals.com/SystemInformationUtilities.html

There are some other great tools on this page. Check out Mark's blog, too.

Designing a UI

Interesting discussion about whether significant effort should be expended upon UI design.

Opinion One:

The best UI's are undoubtedly those that are intuitive and reinforce the user's actions thought text, graphics and actions. It should be obvious what the user needs to do. The increased development time is rewarded by the building up of a suite of controls that tackle these issues over time, user satisfaction, and decreased training costs.

Opinion Two:

Significant effort should not be expended upon bells and whistles for the interface. It should meet requirements. Any usage issues can be countered by training, which would be cheaper and faster; as any usage issues cannot be tackled by increased development time, which implies that the application is delivered faster.

Opinion Three:

Why doesn't your app have full keyboard support, you losers.

Opinion Four:

Usability is less important in Intranet Applications as these can be countered by training; also, by maintaining the look and feel of existing applications, there should be fewer usage problems as people will encounter nothing new.

Personal Comment:

I note that none of the standard project documentation mentions usability testing. Nor are there any recommendations regarding UI design for people with disabilities.

Useful: Classic Search in XP

I was never convinced that the XP Search interface was better than the Windows 2000 one.

That's why it's good to find this:

http://www.petri.co.il/restore_classic_search_in_windows_xp.htm

I want one of these

Such a cool idea

Rory Blyth's in town

Rory Blyth, MSDN presenter, developer, and borderline genius/madman ;-) (I think the line between genius and madness might be thinner than a forward slash, like say, a |) is in London this week.

Anyone going to the dinner?

http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/15251.aspx

Leaving Work

Announced this evening, over the PA system.

"Will all employees please move away from the windows overlooking Cabot Square. Move to the other side of the building."

London

So. It's happened.

Tony Blair confirmed multiple terrorist attacks on London today, resulting in loss of life, injury and damage to infrastructure.

It was chaos this morning. Total lack of communication. Rumours flying.

Power surges on the Tube leading to explosions. Well, apparently, "Power Surge" is a stock explanation designed not to instill panic into people. It seemed to work.

People worried for family, friends and colleagues. As information became more readily available, a general sense of confirmation - everyone seemed to know what it was already.

And now people are worried about the side effects. No transport, apparently for the rest of the day according to Charles Clarke. So people are going to have real difficulty getting home.

We shall wait and see. But I've got confidence in people.