… and his “clever” UI:

The error is that control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable.

Continue reading: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces.

If it will be only one conference that I’d be allowed to attend during one… no, two… tree… years it will be the Norwegian Developers Conference 2009.

Absolutely fantastic speakers line-up:

• Jeremy Miller
• Ayende Rahien
• Glenn Block
• Robert C. Martin
• Jimmi Nilsson
• Udi Dahan
• … and more…

Each of these speakers are well known in software development community by their contributions to open-source projects or by efforts they do to promote best values and practices in software engineering, sharing experience and teaching mere mortals.

Extraordinary agenda, tracks and talks. If I’d be able to go there, sure I’ll find a way to divide myself to see as much possible parallel tracks.

If you’re searching for best investments for your money in a tough economic climate, you’ve found it: your skills and Norwegian Developers Conference.

More a note to myself, because I’m sure, will bump again in this issue later.

I’ve edited some strings in our XAML files to correct some french words. Someone pointed that I’m not playing well with french-specific characters (you now, the é, è, à, …). After committing my changes our build server went down with a strange error:

error MC3000: ‘Invalid character in the given encoding. Line 58, position 47.’ XML is not valid.

Hmm. On my machine VS has built and run it without any problems. Compiling from command line – same error.

Problem: Compiler launched from command line cannot process the source file because of international characters that I’ve just added.

Solution: Save source file explicitly in UTF-8 encoding to preserve international characters.

How To:

• open the problematic file in Visual Studio.
• on the File menu click “Advanced Save Options“
• from “Encoding” combo select “Unicode (UTF-8 …“
• click OK.

You’re set. Commit to please the build server and rest of the team waiting for green.

Until last week I was indifferent to podcasts. Not really indifferent – I knew they exists, a lot of people likes them, they’re about things that sometimes are interesting for me. But I had absolutely no time to listen to them… Blogs & mailing lists are my choice to feed my knowledge and laziness demons…

Being car-less lately, offered me an opportunity to dig into podcast’s world. In my 30-40 minutes commuting I’ve start listening to audio feeds. So far, my preferred are:

• Alt.NET Podcast
• Herding Code
• Hanselminutes
• Software Engineering Radio
• Elegant Code Cast

Despite relatively slow informational flow and manageability (it’s way easier to re-read a phrase than rewind an audio stream for an interesting passage, or diagonal read versus jump back & forth to skip something) podcasts made my commuting a bit more enjoyable.

An Update: Scott Hanselman (the author of Hanselminutes cited earlier) is asking his readers about their favorite developer-oriented podcasts, and publishing his own favorites: Hanselman List of Podcasts for .NET Programmers. Very impressive list to compliment my own. Happy listening…

After migration to Windows Vista x64 I’ve found that I can’t access anymore my passwords stored by Password Minder (original site), a small tool I’m using to keep my passwords safe. It goes down when you want to launch it. For sure, it is a x64 compatibility problem.

Fortunately, it is coming with source code. In a matter of minutes I had the Password Minder compiled for x64 target and running without any issues on my dev box.

Mission complete, passwords saved!

Lesson learned: don’t forget, you’re a developer. Don’t be afraid to use big guns outside of your work