Usability in Practice: The Tao of Screen Design

Jeremy Miller explains how internal Domain Specific Languages can help you craft code that is easier to read and write. His bag of tricks to improve your programming includes extension methods, fluent interfaces, object extensions and use of the semantic model.Jeremy MillerMSDN Magazine January 2010

While style and slick visuals are important in Web site design, they shouldn't detract from a site's usability and functionality. Here are some hands-on tips for look and feel, readability, discovery of affordances, and more, with plenty of examples of good and bad design.Ambrose Little, Charles B. KreitzbergMSDN Magazine December 2009

In this column, Ambrose Little and Charlie Kreitzberg discuss best practices, design patterns, and other considerations related to implementing a search feature.Ambrose Little, Charles B. KreitzbergMSDN Magazine November 2009

This article examines how the new support for functional programming techniques in .NET 3.5 can developers make code more declarative, reduce errors in code, and write fewer lines of code for many common tasks.Jeremy MillerMSDN Magazine October 2009

This article explores techniques developers can use to gather information about and incorporate their users' mental models in their software designs.Ambrose Little, Charles B. KreitzbergMSDN Magazine October 2009

The end goal of software projects is to deliver value to the customer. Software design is a major factor in how successfully a team can deliver that value. The best designs are a product of continuous design rather than the result of an effort that tries to get the entire design right up front. This approach lets you strive to apply lessons learned from the project to continuously improve the design, instead of becoming locked into an erroneous design developed too early in the project.Jeremy MillerMSDN Magazine August 2009

Design patterns provide a common, repeatable approach to solving software development tasks, and many different patterns can describe how to accomplish a certain goal in code. When developers begin working with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), they often ask about how to accomplish common tasks with the technology. This month's column discusses several design patterns used in WF.Matthew MilnerMSDN Magazine August 2009

This month's column describes the benefits and methodologies of usability testing.Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose LittleMSDN Magazine July 2009

Use Test-Driven Development with mock objects to design object oriented code in terms of roles and responsibilities, not categorization of objects into class hierarchies.Isaiah PerumallaMSDN Magazine June 2009

This month the authors show you how to treat the user experience as an essential dimension of the development process while retaining the advantages of Agile.Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose LittleMSDN Magazine June 2009