If you’re coming here from the Programmer Day site, you might want to check out the post I did last year on Programmer’s Day, it’s one of the most popular i’ve ever done: 5 Great Code Search Engines.

Have a great day and don’t eat too many doughnuts!

If you haven’t read the KnightKnetwork for long (or ever before) you may not know that I’m a programmer. I work primarily in a heavily macroed assembler that NO ONE else in the world still uses (or I doubt they do anyway).

I’m a big fan of The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas, and one of the suggestions they make is to learn a new programming language every year. So, to do this, I’ve dabbled in Python and PHP but lacking a clear goal, I usually stopped learning as soon as I completed whatever personal project I was working on and got busy with other things. If I want to take on some side projects or more complicated personal ones, then I need more than that and more than my regular assembler so I’ve decided to get some MS Certifications, specifcally the new ASP 3.5 ones.  I’m not sure how many and which paths I’ll go down, but this post will serve as a way to mark the path I do take. These certifications provide set goals and should force me to a more comprehensive knowledge of the technology than I’ve been achieving.

I’ll bookmark useful sites, provide book links to Amazon (affiliate links) of anything I purchase, and post any useful tips I come up with along the way.

General Books And Tools:

• Book: Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB (Programmer to Programmer)
• Site: Microsoft Learning – Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Certification
• Exam Discounts: MS First to Know

Exam 70-536: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation

• Core exam required for all the others
• MS Learning Site for Exam 70-536
• Book: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation

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• What’s New in ASP.NET 3.5?
• Some Results from Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey

Let me offer the disclaimer that I don’t regularly program in MS products, I do occasionally and I’ve been considering going for the new certifications when they are released to beef up my knowledge and ability to do work on the side. Still, I love going to MS events because they are so well presented and really get you excited about the work MS is doing for developers. I usually leave an event wanting to go out and try the technology immediately even if I have no ability to do so! To give you idea of how this launch event went, I haven’t installed any of that nice new, shiny, powerful software yet. It’s still shrink wrapped a week later. I wasn’t motivated, I wasn’t inspired, and I wasn’t impressed.

All this is not to say that these products aren’t great and that the new features weren’t covered, it’s just that the coverage was a watered down rehash of info gone over at MSDN Events or was presented without any point of reference to how it was better. If you have a captive audience staring a big screen then make use of the visual! I was 75% of the way towards the back and I couldn’t read any of the code unless the presenter zoomed his screen (this only happened once while I was there). If you want the audience to Oooooh and Aaaaah like they’re watching a knife cut through a cement block then you’re going to have to give us some eye candy… why no silverlight?!? Being in Beta is no excuse, it has never stopped an MSDN Event presenter from showing us the goods.

All said I’ll keep coming to the launch events for the software, but I hope to see better presentations in the future. MS knows you can’t do much that’s meaningful in the short time we’re a captive audience so give us a quick run down if the changes, some before and after code samples, and lots of eye-candy!

Download the latest version of TipThis with sidebar widgets form the TipThis home post.

The current version is 0.5 and is still in ‘beta’ but I have it running on Polled.info if you want to confirm it works.

Better documentation will follow but for now you just need:

1. Download the widget
2. Unzip and upload to your plugins folder
3. Active the plugin
4. Under Presentation -> Widgets drag the spottt ad where you want it
5. Click the little notepad icon on the widget admin to edit the settings
6. Title: Name the sidebar section, or leave blank for no title section
7. Spottt ID: This is that long string of letters and numbers in the ‘Embed’ code
8. Press Enter to save and check your site for the ad!

Features include:

• Adding your TipJoy UserID to your header to claim your tips
• Option to add Tip This buttons to EVERYTHING, this will spam your front page with buttons
• More selective option to add a button to Post pages
• More selective option to add a button to Page pages
• Snazzy admin page

Downloads are available from the Official TipJoy TipThis post or right click and save as here.
Bugs and feature requests can be posted here or emailed to me @ David -at- KnightKnetwork.com

Win a free WPDesigner.com Theme Club membership for testing the plugin! Click for more info!

In technology, change is a way of life. Feature stagnation will lead to a competitor jumping ahead of you and an abandonment of your product. At the same time, changes in your product can cause a backlash from users who aren’t happy with the results. A thread on Hacker News is what brought this to my mind and I wanted to explore the subject a little further.

What happens that causes users to hate change and what steps can be taken to make things run smoothly?

In my experience there are three main groups of users who are unhappy with change:

1. Users who don’t like anything to change
2. Users who don’t need the changes and now have more work to do for the same results
3. Users who aren’t using your product the way you intended and who’s functionality has been broken

Do you deal with users who don’t fall into these groups? I’m not talking about people with minor complaints, I’m talking about users that get really angry or frustrated. Passionate users that will let you know how they feel and aren’t afraid to go elsewhere.

What can be done to ease change and make it more universally accepted? I don’t think there’s a silver bullet for this problem, but there are certainly some things that you can do to help:

• Prepare users for the change: Educate your users ahead of time giving them all the info they need about whats coming, making sure to focus on the improvements from their point of view.
• Poll users about the change: Only do this if you care about the results, polling to get a result that you want is a bad idea and if it backfires things could get ugly quickly.
• Preserve old functionality: No one wants to support multiple versions of a product, but it’s done all the time. Why? People don’t get angry about change when they don’t have to do it.
• Enhance simplicity: This is harder than it sounds, adding features while keeping your user experience simple is very challenging. If you can do this and focus your changes on the backend with minimal frontend changes you’ve created a truly elegant product.
• Incorporate unorthodox usage: If a user is using your product in a different way than you intended, then that user has just added value for free. If their usage has some merit seriously look at expanding in the new direction with your next enhancements instead of slamming a door.

While we may want to blame problems with change on our users, if you look hard enough you’ll see that it’s a problem of our own making. I’m curious if other programmers have a different view on this, other categories of change resistant customers or other strategies to make change go smoothly.