What browsers does your app support?

To focus on supporting modern browsers, we are deprecating official compatibility of Google Analytics with Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) at the end of 2013.

Above is a snippet from the latest blog post on the Google Analytics blog. The Analytics team have made the bold(ish) step of announcing the end of the line for IE 8 support in the next 3 months. It doesn't seem all that long ago when they announced they were dropping support IE 7 (and Firefox 3.5/Safari 3); but that was back in June 2011! Don't forget that they dropped proper support for IE 8 in a range of Google Apps like Gmail and Calendar last year, those users get basic HTML offerings with many features removed or read-only type views of the apps.

I'd love to see the analytics browser usage data for Google Analytics to see how many of their customer's are going to be affected!

I'm going to use this news as motivation to drop our legacy IE support (we still support even older browsers than IE 8 :/) - I'll let you know how it goes.

Git branching tutorial

Working with branches in git is easy. That's not saying there's some powerful, more advanced commands for complicated branching scenarios. This git branching tutorial demonstrates the basics and those advanced commands you may not even be aware of - worth a play if you've got 30 mins spare.

OWASP web application security cheat sheets

The OWASP Cheat Sheet Series was created to provide a concise collection of high value information on specific web application security topics. These cheat sheets were created by multiple application security experts and provide excellent security guidance in an easy to read format.

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cheat_Sheets

Nice CSS layouts tutorial...

Tutorial that demonstrates CSS fundamentals to novices well (also useful for veterans looking for a friendly refresher).

http://learnlayout.com/

Disable or hide UI components?

When rendering the UI for a user, if a user doesn't have access to certain options, should the UI components be disabled or hidden?

I've been pondering this question all day and my particular use-case relates to navigation in an app. After lots of thinking, some discussions and some googling for UI wisdom, I've come to a fairly definitive conclusion. Users should have visibility on all components/options as long as the user can potentially use them. What I mean here, is that if the components require certain conditions to be met before the user can use them then they should still be present. If for the current user the components can never be used - they should be hidden. An inconsistent UI should be avoided and an inconsistent UI where components come and go will only confuse users more. A good analogy suggested by someone on a similar topic:

When the light bulb burns out, the light switch is still there. In the physical world, things don't disappear in thin air when they switch to a unusable condition.

Obviously there's probably exceptions to this rule, but I imagine this will hold true for most use-cases of this nature.

Don't assume anything about the lifetime of ActionFilters in MVC3

In previous versions of ASP.NET MVC, action filters were created per request except in a few cases. This behavior was never a guaranteed behavior but merely an implementation detail and the contract for filters was to consider them stateless. In ASP.NET MVC 3, filters are cached more aggressively. Therefore, any custom action filters which improperly store instance state might be broken.

Taken from the 'breaking changes' section of the release notes for MVC3.

The statement is clear enough to someone feeling the sting still from a recent live issue, but I've outlined a bad and good example of custom action filters below. Basically, if you find yourself needing to store state for the lifetime of a request, use the filterContext.HttpContext.Items collection.

Bad custom action filter

public class BadActionFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    private string _userState;

    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        _userState = someSortOfDataUniqueToUser();
    }

    public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        // using _userState here is a bad idea!
    }
}

Good custom action filter

public class GoodActionFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        var userState = someSortOfDataUniqueToUser();
        filterContext.HttpContext.Items["userState"] = userState;
    }

    public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        var userState = filterContext.HttpContext.Items["userState"];
        // using userState here is perfectly fine!
    }
}

Kanban Land is wonderful

Original: http://blog.crisp.se/2009/06/26/henrikkniberg/1246053060000

UI and UX

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

A little older and a little wiser, at least I'd like to think so. I find myself considering design and usability more of late and I'm feeling positive about the results on the projects I'm working on. But I don't think I'm alone on this, thankfully I'm seeing this on a large scale across the web. Sites failing to properly consider design and user experience are beginning to stand out like a sore thumb. I have less time and patience for these sites (perhaps it's my age again?) and I'm quick to find an alternative if needed (perhaps I should drop Ling an email and tell her where she's going wrong?).

Here's some links to some sites I'm finding particularly useful at the moment:

• Smashing Magazine - An online magazine for designers and developers with some great articles
  
• UX Myths - A site dedicated to listing common UX misconceptions and why they don't hold true
• UX Stack Exchange - A collaboratively edited question and answer site for user experience
• User-centered Design - (article) type of UI design and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at EACH STAGE of the design process

I'm also reading Rock Surgery Made Easy (by Steve Krugg) at the moment, which is perfect for those wanting to do some DIY usability testing.

Clearing SQL Server cache for performance testing

You can restart windows or the windows service, but the more elegant way is to use DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS.

To drop clean buffers from the buffer pool, first use CHECKPOINT to produce a cold buffer cache. This forces all dirty pages for the current database to be written to disk and cleans the buffers. After you do this, you can issue DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS command to remove all buffers from the buffer pool.

USE MyDatabaseName;
GO

CHECKPOINT;
GO

DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS;
GO