Website design

One of the most popular sites is google - 1 picture, 1 textbox and 2 buttons. One of those two is never used...

So why the hell they are continue to make those flashy websites with self-advertisments? Probably it is because of designers that came from the street world. The shops have to make a flashy showcase because customers see it in a first place and based on it make a choice - which shop to visit. But with websites it is completely different. The user have already typed your url. Or asked google for direction (and in google search results they are all the same!).
It is much better to make a good user experience design - design where it is completely clear where to read what you want and where to put your credit card number! I`m not sure, but if some site is too provoking, personally, I would try not to use it again...
Moreover, most of experienced users made a habit to ignore all the flashy stuff on the right, left and top of the page. So why to put your actual content into self-sliding panel? It just annoying!

Well what I want to say is - lets make a great user-friendly websites! :)

And a little picture related to this issue:

Google Custom Search and Firefox

Another thing I`ve worked on was an implementing of the google custom search for our website. We`ve decided to use two paged view. The script for search input was stored into a user control whichwas used on every page and the script for results was added to a separate page.

Clean and easy! Almost... This worked just fine for most of the browsers - Chrome (obviously), Opera, Safari... But the Firefox was an unpleasant exception. It was throwing google.search.Search.apiaryXXXXX is not a function, like:

TypeError: google.search.Search.apiary17868 is not a function

So this task will require something bigger then a copy-paste :)
And the answer was to implement our own control for search input, because the exception comes from 2 google scripts on a single page..  Moreover - implementing input string as a separate control will result in more flexible design!

The simplest implementation in WebForms - 1 TextBox, 1 Button and a handler for that button with redirect:

Response.Redirect(_searchResultsUrl + "?" + QuerystringParam + txt.Text);

Service runner

One of my recent tasks was to create a "service runner" - a small application that we can use to more easily test our service projects. That app was relatively simple yet useful so I`ve decided that it is worth posting on Git! (Yep, my very first repository on Git)

It is available here: ServiceRunner. And you can even see my photo there! :)

But speaking of that tool. As I`ve said it is quite simple - it is just a WinForms application with one referenced "FakeService". FakeService is there only for demonstration purposes. In order to use that you will have to reference your service project(s) to it, add a wrapper in the FormLoad event - in order to be able to choose from a dropdown and set breakpoints!

This helper will call OnStart and OnStop methods using corresponding buttons. In addition this app will try to load corresponding App.Config file, so your services might use that as you wish - using custom sections etc.

And I would like to announce some features I want to add in future.

1. Logging. For now it is writing only Start|Stop events and it would be great to catch all the logging from the given service - somehow
2. Dynamic service loader. It might be easier to use by only choosing the right path for the corresponding dll and app.config file.
3. I`m not sure but other events like OnShutdown might be usefull for someone as well...