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March 26, 2007 I was recently on an initial phone screen with a candidate for a developer position here at Dovetail, and towards the end of our conversation, I asked him if he had any questions. After a few standard ones, he asked me about our web development standards, especially in the area of HTML standards, use of CSS, etc. I answered, especially gearing my answer towards how we approach these topics in the current web application project that we're working on, and explaining how we've worked especially hard over the last year or so at improving our development methodologies and work product. He noted that my answer didn't jibe with the code on the dovetailsoftware.com website. He noted that the site makes heavy use of tables (for non-tabular data), lots of embedded styles (as opposed to CSS), bad class naming (class="table3", class="style15"),…

March 23, 2007 Once again, Hugh MacLeod's hits another one out of the park with a cartoon drawn on the back of a business card. Hugh: Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. If you don't read Hugh's blog yet - what are you waiting for? Just subscribe already.

One of our users came to me this week with a request to expand the size of the contact's job title field. Apparently people now have ridiculously long titles such as Assistant to the Regional Director of Synergistic Business Alliances, Northwest Montana Region. Using a simple SchemaScript and the Dovetail SchemaEditor, this change is trivial. Here's my complete script: <schemaScript xmlns="http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/2006/10/SchemaScript.xsd">       <updateColumn table="contact" name="title">          <length>100</length>     </updateColumn></schemaScript> Because I have an XSD that defines what schema scripts should look like, and I used Visual Studio to create my script, I know that my script is valid before actually running it with SchemaEditor. It for some reason I had a typo or I didn't close a tag, VS would visually let me know.With my script in place, I simply run SchemaEditor to apply the changes: schemaeditor.exe -apply Output Report: Dovetail SchemaEditor Difference…

The asp.net website now has a set of "How do I" videos, including ASP.NET, AJAX, SQL Server 2005 Express, and intros to new technologies such as LINQ. I really like how they start with the basics, such as: #1 What is a database?  I think these are cool not only for the content, but for the format: bite-size chunks of self-learning. Taking it to the next level, why not incorporate this style of tutorial directly into your application? That would be much nicer than reading the typical user manual. Good stuff.