About a month ago, David Pallman, the leader of the Custom Application Development Practice Council at Neudesic, issued a call to action for more Neudesic consultants to give back to the community through open source CodePlex projects. So I answered his call, and I seem to be the only one at the moment. Nevertheless, I started the Composite WPF Shell project. Check it out. More...

In my last post, I discussed what my production environment looks like for ImaginaryRealities.com. In this post, I'll discuss my development environment that I'm using to build the ImaginaryRealities.com web site. I won't focus so much on the hardware than on the software and tools that I'm using to build the web site. More...

Microsoft released version 4.3 of their StyleCop utility. StyleCop is an add in for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that will parse and analyze the source code for a project. StyleCop can be used to ensure that code matches coding standards adopted by a software development company or team. It's an excellent tool that helps to ensure the overall quality of a product. StyleCop is similar to FxCop, except that it examines the source code instead of a compiled assembly.

I'll be honest, my artistic abilities kind of max out once I get to doodles and stick figures. Sure, I can draw 3D cubes better than anyone that I know, or nice UML diagrams on a white board, but I've always struggled from a user experience perspective when it comes to building web or Windows user interfaces.

One of the biggest frustrations that I've always had is color selection. I've always been horrible at it, but mostly because standard computer science curriculum and most textbooks on developing software spend very little time on color theory or selection.

It's not until recently, when I've been dedicating more time to understanding using CSS for designing web pages, that I've come to better understand color theory. There are many great CSS books out there right now that spend a decent amount of time discussing color selection. Through one of these books, I came across the Color Scheme Generator web application.

This is a great little web application. You can use the color wheel to pick out your base hue. If none of the base colors suit your need, and you have the RGB value for another color that you'd like to use, you can enter the RGB value and generate a custom color scheme. From the chosen base hue, the Color Scheme Generator will generate a palette of usable colors in either a monotone, contrast (using the complementary hue), triad (3 colors), tetrad (4 colors), or analogic color scheme. In addition, the Color Scheme Generator will let you adjust the size of the angles for the triad, tetrad, and analogic color schemes to vary the colors even more. Once the color scheme has been chosen, you can also alter the chosen colors more by choosing pastel, dark pastel, light pastel, contrast, or pale colors.

This is a great utility for selecting colors to use in a document or to use as the basis of a user experience for either a web or Windows application. Definitely add this tool to your toolbox.

I like ASP.NET and building web sites and web applications in ASP.NET. I haven't liked SharePoint development. I'll be honest, SharePoint intimidates me. I haven't made enough time to sit down and understand CAML or creating custom site definitions. I like things that I can upgrade and I think that SharePoint is difficult on that point. I like developing on client operating systems to experience what the end-user experiences, and installing and developing on a Windows Server OS just hasn't felt right. I don't like having to switch environments to get me email and do all of my other activities.

I dislike developing for SharePoint, but I've never said that I never will develop for SharePoint, and now I'm starting to reach a point where I really need to consider it. Let me explain to you why... More...

One of the aspects of software development that I take pride in is what I perceive to be my knowledge of building and releasing software. As I go from project to project, I've learned that not many people fully understand the importance that a project's structure or build process has to the success of a project. It's not just about creating directories. What I like to call "build engineering" affects your version control strategies, customer support strategies, and the ability to manage multiple releases of your software in a production environment. As a developer, it's too easy to focus on the next release of the software and try to forget that you have customers that are actively using various earlier versions of your applications. More...