When it comes to designing a great interface for an app, website or other tool, User Experience (UX) should be at the center of everything you do. But how do you know if your navigation, display and page organization offer a smooth and easy to use experience? Naturally, designers know their designs inside out, but do they make any sense to end users? Prototypes offer the middle ground here, providing a way of gauging…

The highly anticipated new Visual Studio RTM 2015 was officially announced yesterday during a full-day release event, where  Microsoft also revealed VS 2013 Update 5, and TFS 2013 Update 5. And we’re pleased to say that our developer tools are – as they have always been - fully compatible with this new Visual Studio release!

With these releases, Microsoft promises ‘’to bring the productivity of Visual Studio…

To break up the usual code-filled technical blogs you see all day, we’ve got something a little different for you today. Our friend Remy Porter from The Daily WTF has written a guest post about the joys of efficiency in coding. You can read more of Remy’s work at The Daily WTF, and you can find him on Twitter too. Enjoy!

“How may I help you?” the receptionist asked.

George introduced himself…

This month, we're giving you an inside look at the creation and development of our new  Project Management Dashboard, which we built using our jQuery controls along with ASP.NET MVC Helpers. You'll find the use of the controls with this application to be pretty interesting, so let’s dive in and give you a quick glance at how this app was built!

For this dashboard, we utilized the Infragistics jQuery doughnut…

Since WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) was introduced by Microsoft in 2006 as part of the .NET framework, the platform has been on the rise in popularity among Windows developers. However, the lack of major improvements since August 2012 and Microsoft’s notion during Build 2014 that it was “… not planning on any investing in major changes to WPF” have reinforced speculations about the platform…

We interact with mobile apps almost every single day, whether it’s checking social networks, finding things to do, or to share data and experiences. The best designed apps fit almost unnoticed into our lives - they’re easy to navigate, the UX is pleasant and intuitive and help us achieve goals quicker and easier. However, users are instantly put off an app which is clunky, confusing and hard to use - there’s nothing as…

In modern software engineering testing the performance of the software is a vital part of the development process. With a performance test the components of the system are monitored to see how they will handle in a particular situation. Besides testing the components of the software solution, the performance test will also validate the resource usage, scalability and reliability of the product. A common mistake is the…

It’s no secret among developers that there is no better development environment than Microsoft Visual Studio. It offers the most complete set of tools to create powerful windows-, web- or any other application and can be done in almost any common language. Visual Studio is available in a version that fits every developer’s needs. Recently Microsoft announced the new Visual Studio 2015 product line, including…

WinForms has long been a popular way to develop form and GUI based applications, generally for Windows based devices. Part of the .NET framework, and originally seen as a replacement for Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), WinForms applications are ‘event driven’. That is they sit and wait for a user to interact with them, before springing into action and reacting to this input.

Whilst still a useful…

Can you remember the first time you browsed the internet from a mobile phone? Pages seemed to take days to load, video was an impossibility and even basic interaction - filling forms or copying text - was a real struggle. Now, however, we use the internet so often from our smartphones and tablets, we easily forget just how far the industry has come in a few short years. Today’s mobile web browsers are faster, smoother…

One of the key drivers behind a mobile or desktop platforms’ success are the number of apps available in its corresponding app store. The Windows Phone store is catching up, but is still very much behind iOS and Android. The Windows store faces the same issue - it just does not contain enough apps (although it’s improving).

The biggest issue Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 stores had was that they were two…

At the beginning of February, Microsoft announced their release of CoreCLR on GitHub, where developers can now get their hands on the roughly 2.6 million lines of source code of which it is comprised. This move comes as part of their wider open sourcing of the .NET Core and a lot of people are already finding interesting ways of using the code. The releases are currently restricted to Windows, but will soon be available…

The concept of migrating from rich client desktop applications to modern web technologies that encompass the desktop browser, tablet and mobile devices is not new.  However, the pressure to move apps off the desktop and onto multi-channel, modern web is happening now at record pace, but the path is not as clear as it may seem.  Everything from the data layer, the service layer, the interaction models and UI patterns are…

Wouldn’t you just love to hand Microsoft a wishlist of your dream changes and improvements to Visual Studio? How often have you thought “if only it could…” when trying to carry out some unusual coding task?

Unsurprisingly, you’re not the only one! As impressive as Visual Studio is, playing catching up with the demands of modern technology is a game that Microsoft have to take part in constantly…

For a long time we’ve been using WinForms when it comes to building Desktop applications. WinForms provides access to the native Microsoft Windows interface elements by wrapping the existing Windows API in managed code. WPF on the other hand, is the new platform for Microsoft Windows application development, based on the .NET Framework. This framework provides a clear, object-oriented, extensible set of classes that enable…

Many Office 365 power users and IT professionals still struggle with understanding how Yammer - Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Network (ESN) offering - can be adopted by their organisation. Although Microsoft has offered the platform for a number of years now, there remains a substantial gap in understanding of how the tool can be used.

Research suggests that up to eighty percent of companies which introduce Enterprise…

What we love about building amazing User Experiences is the challenge of working with new technologies, pushing boundaries and inspiring innovation. It’s a field which means we’re constantly pushed to be creative and have a finger on the pulse of what’s trending in the industry and keeping one step ahead in the design game.

UX designers everywhere were taken aback when Microsoft introduced the Modern…

As a WinForms developer you constantly need to be aware of the way the application will work. Will there be some heavy calculation involved that can block the user interface or is it necessary to execute jobs simultaneously? The technique of threading can be very challenging, so in this post we will look at some golden rules for using threading correctly.

A thread is a piece of code in execution. Each application has…

The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) has emerged in the last few years as a means of developing rich, next generation applications and so there has been some speculation as to whether it will supersede WinForms. Part of the .NET Framework, WinForms has been a staple for designers building desktop applications for a long time now. Fundamentally, it lets them build powerful user interfaces. It’s involved in responding…

It has been a busy few weeks and months in the world of wireframes and prototypes. Let’s take a look at the latest stories from around the web (and closer to home):

Not one but two updates to Indigo Studio

We start with some recent, and significant updates to our own wireframe and prototype tool - Indigo Studio. The first update added the following features:

• Specify background images in Bootstrapped responsive…

We are well into 2015 and as a developer it is important to know what kind of technology or framework will be leading the way in the coming months. Every year the number of applications being created and used grows. Important is the fact that applications are becoming more and more complex, especially on the front end. Sending data from the client to the server, updating data stores or re-rendering parts of a page. These…

"Remember, kids, your projects are due a week from Monday, so you'd better get started if you haven't already."

This imminently relatable phrase, or one like it, is probably the first exposure to nagging that most of us had outside of the home. Oh sure, Mom and Dad had nagged us for years to clean our rooms, say please and thank you, and wear jackets. But our teachers introduced us to business naggin…

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a Microsoft technology that was initially released as part of the .NET Framework 3.0. Previously known as "Avalon", WPF is used as a presentation system for building Windows client applications with a rich user experience. With WPF, developers can create a wide range of both standalone and browser hosted applications.

While it is useful, it is not universally known in…