July 2010 : Page 4 of 4 : Global Nerdy

Ten Things You Need to Know About Design

What you see above is a slide from Jason Putorti’s slide deck titled 10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design. Don’t let the title throw you off: everything in the presentation is even more important for developers because we actually make the things our customers use.

If you decide to commit only one of these ten things to memory, commit this one: Design is more than pretty pictures. It’s about combining different aspects of intelligence – rationality, creativity and empathy – to meet your users’ needs and drive business success. It’s about crafting the user experience, which is how the thing you’re designing works in the real world and how your users feel about it.

I’ve included the slide deck below…enjoy!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

Once again, it’s time for another installment of This Week on Channel 9 (or TWC9 for short), Microsoft’s regular video webcast featuring Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller, who provide entertaining and informative coverage of the news of the week for the .NET developer community.

In this episode, Dan and Brian cover:

IIS Express: A mix between the simplicity of the Visual Studio built-in Web development server and full IIS
SQL Compact Edition 4: A lightweight database for Web sites that can be XCopy installed
Silverlight Pivot Viewer: Now Available!
The MSDN site gets redesigned
XAML Formatting: For the first time in a long time, Dan and Brian agree (and so do I): you should break every attribute onto its own line for readability
WPF Inspector & Snoop: Two handy tools for WPF development
The .NET Micro Framework Team puts .NET Micro Framework on a bicycle
The BCL Team proposes adding .zip file support to System.IO. Give them feedback on their API!
JSON Data Visualizer: A Code Project project to see visualize results from JSON services like Facebook
PEX for Fun: use PEX to automatically solve puzzles
Phone7 Action Pack: Open source set of utilities for Windows Phone 7 development

The episode also features Dan’s and Brian’s picks of the week:

Dan had two picks this week:
- The Archivist: An application that lets you save and store Tweets over time for later analysis, tracking, review, whatever! And it’s open source!
- Pivot for Netflix instant view movies: Steve Marx has an overview of how it was made
Brian’s pick: Visual Studio 2010 RTM Virtual Machine with Sample Data & Hands-on Labs

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.