Format DateTime in GridView BoundField or TemplateField

 

Eval has a second parameter which lets you specify the string format. The BoundField has a DataFormatString property:

<asp:TemplateField>
    <ItemTemplate>
        <asp:Label ID="ExampleDate" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("ExampleDate", "{0:MM/dd/yyyy}") %>'></asp:Label>
    </ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
<asp:BoundField DataField="ExampleDate" HeaderText="Example Date 2" DataFormatString = "{0:d}" />

LINQ to SQL

Grouping in LINQ to SQL is nothing like SQL. It returns an IEnumerable of IGrouping.

Validation and Business Rules

From Rocky Lhotka’s Business Objects pg 40: “A lot of business logic involves the enforcement of validation rules. The fact that one date must be later than another date is a validation rule. Some validation rules involve calculations and others are merely toggles. You can think about validation rules as being either broken or not. And when one or more rules are broken the object is invalid.

A similar concept is the idea of business rules that might alter the state of the object. The fact that a given piece of text data must be all uppercase is a business rule. The calculation of one property value based on other property values is a business rule. Most business rules involve some level of calculation… Business rules typically alter the state of the object and usually don’t enforce validation at the same time.”

A comment on Ayende Rahien’s blog article:

“Name is not empty is an invariant of the entity. Not a business rule because it is not something that can happen (yes, I know about bad data and no constraints).”

[CSSVault] Create Stunning Drop Down Calendars Quickly

 

Need a calendar date picker for your web application? Calendar is a JavaScript class that automagically creates a graphical calendar date picker for your date fields. The sample calendars are gorgeous, complete with drop shadows and drag and drop capability. The experimental calendar even features a graphic that changes every month — much like a real-life calendar would have.

It uses the Mootols JavaScript library. It is very flexible and customizable and comes complete with documentation.

[CSSVault] Create Stunning Drop Down Calendars Quickly

[WebAppers] Flot Pure Javascript Plotting Library for jQuery

 Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming. Although Flot is easy to use, it is also advanced enough to be suitable for Web 2.0 data mining/business intelligence purposes which is its original application. The plugin is targeting all newer browsers.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://code.google.com/p/flot/
License: MIT License

[WebAppers] Flot Pure Javascript Plotting Library for jQuery

[ALA] Never use a Warning when you Mean Undo

by Aza Raskin

Have you ever had that sinking feeling when you realize—just a split second too late—that you shouldn’t have clicked “Okay” in the “Are you sure you want to quit?” dialog?

Yes? Well, you’re in good company—everybody has had a similar experience, so there’s no need to feel ashamed about it. It’s not your fault: it’s your software’s fault.

Why? Because software should “know” that we form habits. Software should know that after clicking “Okay” countless times in response to the question, we’ll probably click “Okay” this time too, even if we don’t mean to. Software should know that we won’t have a chance to think before accidentally throwing our work away.

Why should it know these things? Because software designers should know that we form habits, whether we want to or not.

Habit formation is actually good thing: it saves us the trouble of having to think when confronted with interface banalities and it lessens the probability that our train of thought will get derailed. In the case of the “Are you sure you want to quit?” dialog, our hands have memorized close-and-click as a single continuous gesture. That’s good, because most of the time we don’t want to think about the question—we just do the right thing. Unfortunately, our habits sometimes make us do the wrong thing: we don’t even have time to realize our mistake until after we’ve made it.

So, as designers we are led to a general interface principle: If an interface is to be humane, it must respect habituation.

Possible solutions

What about making the warning harder to ignore? A subtle warning will get passed by, so let’s pull out all the stops: we’ll blink the screen and play a loud stretching noise to ensure that the user is paying attention. Try as we might, it still won’t work. The more in-your-face the warning is, the faster we’ll want to get away from it (by clicking “Okay”) and the more mistakes we’ll make. The thing is, no matter how fully in-your-face the computer presents the warning, we’ll still make the same mistake—clicking “Okay” when we don’t mean to. But it’s still not our fault: as long as it’s possible to habituate to dismissing the message, we’ll habituate, and then we’ll make mistakes.

What about making the warning impossible to ignore? If it’s habituation on the human side that is causing the problem, why not design the interface such that we cannot form a habit. That way we’ll always be forced to stop and think before answering the question, so we’ll always choose the answer we mean. That’ll solve the problem, right?

This type of thinking is not new: It’s the type-the-nth-word-of-this-sentence-to-continue approach. In the game Guild Wars, for example, deleting a character requires first clicking a “delete” button and then typing the name of the character as confirmation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. In particular:

1. It causes us to concentrate on the unhabitual-task at hand and not on whether we want to be throwing away our work. Thus, the impossible-to-ignore warning is little better than a normal warning: We end up losing our work either way. This (losing our work) is the worst software sin possible.
2. It is remarkably annoying, and because it always requires our attention, it necessarily distracts us from our work (which is the second worst software sin).
3. It is always slower and more work-intensive than a standard warning. Thus, it commits the third worst sin—requiring more work from us than is necessary.

In the Guild Wars example, points two and three aren’t particularly apropos because deleting a character is an infrequent action. However, if we had to type the name of a document before being allowed to exit it without saving, we would find it very burdensome.

What have we learned? That interfaces that don’t respect habituation are very bad. Making the warning bigger, louder, and impossible-to-ignore doesn’t seem to work; any way we look at it, warnings lead us into a big black interface pit. So let’s get rid of the warning altogether.

Undo to the rescue

Merely removing warnings doesn’t save our work from peril, but using an “undo” function does. Let me say that again: The solution to our warning woes is undo. With a robust undo, we can close our work with reckless abandon and be secure in the knowledge that we can always get it back. With undo, we can make that horrible “oops!” feeling go away by getting our work back. [1]

Because we form habits, we’ll never be able to guarantee that we won’t have an “oops!” moment. Instead, designers must accept that it will happen and design for it. Whenever we have the opportunity to throw away work, the computer must allow us to undo our actions.

This leads to one of the most basic and important mantras of interface design: Never use a warning when you mean undo.

Google Mail is a outstanding example of this mantra. When you delete an e-mail, it immediately gives you an option to undo that action. How humane! This neatly sidesteps the issue of warnings (as well as the visibility issue of undo). When we make a mistake (which we are bound to do) it isn’t very costly because we can just undo it. With undo, we spend less time worrying and more time doing work.

fig. 1. It’s not too late. Gmail gives users the option to undo their deletes.

Of course this is only one layer of undo—and Gmail goes even further. After you delete a message, it isn’t gone forever… it sits in the trash so that you can retrieve it if you decide later that you didn’t actually want to delete it.

Alas, this is a lesson that Google Calendar hasn’t learned yet. And, as predicted, I’ve deleted events that I didn’t mean to. Sometimes I’ve deleted the wrong event, which is particularly bad because then I’m not even sure what I’ve deleted. Without undo, there is no way to find out.

fig. 2. Be careful! Google Calendar does not allow users to undo accidental deletes.

Actually, even Google Mail hasn’t fully embraced the lesson. When you remove a label from Gmail, up comes one of those wretched warnings. Why is it that Google can get it so right in one place, and mere clicks away get it so wrong? Perhaps because “warn-think” is so ingrained that it takes a heroic effort to break free. Even companies which are generally bastions of good design, like 37Signals, get this one dead wrong.

fig. 3. 37Signals’ application, Highrise, provides warnings but no undos.

Using a warning instead of an undo is the path of least resistance from a programmer’s standpoint, and it doesn’t require any new thinking from a design standpoint. But that isn’t an excuse for our computers to be inhumane.

Conclusion

Warnings cause us to lose our work, to mistrust our computers, and to blame ourselves. A simple but foolproof design methodology solves the problem: “Never use a warning when you mean undo.” And when a user is deleting their work, you always mean undo.

Oh, and the next time you see a warning used instead of undo, send the designer of the application/website a nice e-mail suggesting that they implement an “undo” feature instead. Send them a link to this article. Let’s see if we can’t change the way people design on the web—and in the process make everyone’s computing life more humane and less frustrating in one little way. Let the war on warnings begin!

http://alistapart.com/articles/neveruseawarning

[PSDTuts] 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design

by Collis

Web design can be deceptively difficult. Getting a design that is both usable and pleasing, delivers information and builds brand, is technically sound and visually coherent...

Add to this, the fact that many web designers (myself included) are self taught, that web design is still novel enough to be only a side subject in many design institutions and that the medium changes as frequently as the underlying technology does.

So today I've put together my 9 principles for good web design, it's only my opinions and I've tried to link off to more reading on subjects so you don't only hear my voice. Obviously I have lots of disclaimers, rules are made to be broken, different types of design work differently, I don’t always live up to my own advice etc etc.  So please read these as they are intended, just some observations I am sharing...

Capture the Valley uses bars of colour to guide your eye through sections from top to bottom...

1. Precedence (Guiding the Eye)

Good web design, perhaps even more than other type of design, is about information. One of the biggest tools in your arsenal to do this is precedence.  When using a good design, the user should be led around the screen by the designer.  I call this precedence and it's about how much visual weight different parts of your design have.

A simple example of precedence is that in most sites the first thing you see is the logo.  This is often because it’s large and set at what has been shown in studies to be the first place people look (the top left).  This is a good thing since you probably want a user to immediately know what site they are viewing.

But precedence should go much further.  You should direct the user’s eyes through a sequence of steps.  For example you might want your user to go from logo/brand to a primary positioning statement to punchy image to give the site personality to main body text, with navigation and a side bar taking a secondary position in the sequence. 

What your user should be looking at is up to you, the web designer, to figure out. 

To achieve precedence you have many tools at your disposal:

• Position - Where something is on a page clearly influences in what order the user sees it
• Colour – Using bold and subtle colours is a simple way to tell your user where to look
• Contrast – Being different makes things stand out, being the same makes them secondary.
• Size – Big takes precedence over little (unless everything is big, in which case little might stand out thanks to Contrast)
• Design Elements – if there is a gigantic arrow pointing at something, guess where the user will look?

Further Reading:

You can read more of my thoughts on Precedence in an old PSDTUTS post called Elements of Great Web Design - the polish. Joshua David McClurg-Genevese discusses principles of good web design and design at Digital-Web. Joshua also has the longest name ever :-)

Marius has a very clean, very simple site with plenty of space

2. Spacing

When I first started designing I wanted to fill every available space up with stuff. Empty space seemed wasteful. In fact the opposite is true.

Spacing makes things clearer. In web design there are three aspects of space that you should be considering:

• Line Spacing
  When you lay text out the space between the lines directly affects how readable it appears. Too little space makes it easy for your eye to spill over from one line to the next, too much space means that when you finish one line of text and go to the next your eye can get lost. So you need to find a happy medium. You can control line spacing in CSS with the 'line-height' selector. Generally I find the default value is usually too little spacing. Line Spacing is technically called leading (pronounced ledding) from the process that printers used to use to separate lines of text in ye olde days - by placing bars of lead between the lines.
• Padding
  Generally speaking text should never touch other elements. Images for example should not be touching text, neither should borders or tables. Padding is the space between elements and text. The simple rule here is that you should always have space there. There are exceptions of course, in particular if the text is some sort of heading/graphic or your name is David Carson :-) But as a general rule, putting space between text and the rest of the world makes it infinitely more readable and pleasant.
• White Space
  First of all, white space doesn't need to be white. The term simply refers to empty space on a page (or negative space as it's sometimes called). White space is used to give balance, proportion and contrast to a page. A lot of white space tends to make things seem more elegant and upmarket, so for example if you go to an expensive architect site you'll almost always see a lot of space. If you want to learn to use whitespace effectively, go through a magazine and look at how adverts are laid out. Ads for big brands of watches and cars and the like tend to have a lot of empty space used as an element of design.

Further Reading:

At WebDesignFromScratch there is a great article called the Web 2.0 how-to design guide which discusses Simplicity - a concept that makes a lot of use of spacing. There's plenty of other useful stuff there too!

Noodlebox does a good job of using on/off states in their navigation to keep the user oriented

3. Navigation

One of the most frustrating experiences you can have on a website is being unable to figure out where to go or where you are. I'd like to think that for most web designers navigation is a concept we've managed to master, but I still find some pretty bad examples out there. There are two aspects of navigation to keep in mind:

Navigation - Where can you go?
There are a few common sense rules to remember here. Buttons to travel around a site should be easy to find - towards the top of the page, easy to identify - they should look like navigation buttons, and well described - the text of a button should be pretty clear as to where it's taking you. Aside from the common sense, it's also important to make navigation usable. For example if you have a rollover submenu, ensuring a person can get to the submenu items without losing the rollover is important. Similarly changing the colour or image on rollover is excellent feedback for a user.

Orientation - Where are you now?
There are lots of ways you can orient a user so there is no excuse not to. In small sites it might be just a matter of a big heading or a 'down' version of the appropriate button in your menu. In a larger site you might make use of bread crumb trails, sub headings and a sitemap for the truly lost.

Further Reading:

SmashingMagazine has a selection of CSS-based navigation styles which are nice to go through - and #3 is one of mine! AListApart also has a good article about orientation called Where Am I?

4. Design to Build

Life has gotten a lot easier since web designers transitioned to CSS layouts, but even now it's still important to think about how you are going to build a site when you're still in Photoshop. Consider things like:

• Can it actually be done?
  You might have picked an amazing font for your body copy, but is it actually a standard HTML font? You might have a design that looks beautiful but is 1100px wide and will result in a horizontal scroller for the majority of users. It's really good to know what can and can't be done, which is why I believe all web designers should also build sites, at least sometimes.
• What happens when a screen is resizes?
  Do you need repeating backgrounds, how will they work? Is the design centred or left aligned?
• Are you doing anything which is technically difficult?
  Even with CSS positioning, some things like vertical alignment are still a bit painful and sometimes best avoided.
• Could small changes in your design greatly simplify how you build it?
  Sometimes moving an object around in a design can make a big difference in how you have to code your CSS later. In particular when elements of a design cross over each other it adds a little complexity to the build. So if your design has say three elements and each element is completely separate from each other, it would be really easy to build. On the other hand if all three overlap each other, it might still be easy, but will probably be a bit more complicated. You should find a balance between what looks good and small changes that can simplify your build
• For large sites particularly, can you simplify things?
  There was a time when I used to make image buttons for my sites. So if there was a download button for example I would make a little download image. In the last year or so I've switched to using CSS to make my buttons and have never looked back. Sure it means my buttons don't always have the flexibility I might wish for, but the savings in build time from not having to make dozens of little button images are huge.

If anyone knows good type it's iLoveTypography!

5. Typography

Text is the most common element of design, so it's not surprising that a lot of thought has gone into it. It's important to consider things like:

• Font Choices - Different types of fonts say different things about a design. Some look modern, some look retro. Make sure you are using the right tool for the job.
• Font sizes - Years ago it was trendy to have really small text. Happily these days people have started to realise that text is meant to be read, not just looked at. Make sure your text sizes are consistent, large enough to be read, and proportioned so that headings and sub headings stand out appropriately.
• Spacing - As discussed above, spacing between lines and away from other objects is important to consider. You should also be thinking about spacing between letters, though on the web this is of less importance as you don't have that much control.
• Line Length - There is no hard and fast rule, but generally your lines of text shouldn't be too long. The longer they go for, the harder they are to read. Small columns of text work much better (think about how a newspaper lays out text)
• Colour - One of my worst habits if making low contrast text. It looks good, but doesn't read so well unfortunately. Still I seem to do it with every website design I've ever made, tsk tsk tsk.
• Paragraphing - Before I started designing I loved to Justify everything. It made for nice edges on either side of my paragraphs. Unfortunately justified text tends to create weird gaps between words where they have been auto-spaced. This isn't nice for your eye when reading, so stick to Left-aligned unless you happen to have a magic body of text that happens to space out perfectly.

Further Reading:

Nick La at WebDesignerWall has a great article about online typography called Typographic Contrast and Flow

Happycog know usability inside out, their own site is simple and easy to use.

6. Usability

Web design ain't just about pretty pictures. With so much information and interaction to be effected on a website, it's important that you the designer, provide for it all. That means making your website design usable.

We've already discussed some aspects of usability - navigation, precedence, text - here are three more important ones:

• Adhering to Standards
  There are certain things people expect, not giving them causes confusion. For example, if text has an underline, you expect it to be a link. Doing otherwise is not good usability practice. Sure you can break some conventions, but most of your website should do exactly what people expect it to do!
• Think about what users will actually do
  Prototyping is a common tool used in design to actually 'try' out a design. This is done because often when you actually use a design you notice little things that make a big difference. ALA had an article a while back called Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo which is an excellent example of a small interface design decision that can make life suck for a user.
• Think about user tasks
  When a user comes to your site what are they actually trying to do? List out the different types of tasks people might do on a site, how they will achieve them, and how easy you want to make it for them. This might mean having really common tasks on your homepage (e.g. 'start shopping', 'learn about what we do' etc) or it might mean ensuring something like a search box is always easily accessible. At the end of the day your web design is a tool for people to use, and people don't like using annoying tools!

Further Reading:

AListApart has lots of articles on web usability

Electric pulp manages to look rough, but if you look closely you realise there is a firm grid and things actually all line up

7. Alignment

Keeping things lined up is as important in web design as it is in print design. That's not to say that everything should be in a straight line, but rather that you should go through and try to keep things consistently placed on a page. Aligning makes your design more ordered and digestible, as well making it seem more polished.

You may also wish to base your designs on a specific grid. I must admit I don't do this consciously - though obviously a site like PSDTUTS does in fact have a very firm grid structure. This year I've seen a few really good articles on grid design including SmashingMagazine's Designing with Grid-Based Approach & AListApart's Thinking Outside The Grid. In fact if you're interested in grid design, you should definitely pay a visit to the aptly named DesignByGrid.com home to all things griddy.

The ExpressionEngine site is the soul of clarity. Everything is sharp and clean

8. Clarity (Sharpness)

Keeping your design crisp and sharp is super important in web design. And when it comes to clarity it's all about the pixels.

In your CSS everything will be pixel perfect so there's nothing to worry about, but in Photoshop it is not so... To achieve a sharp design you have to:

• Keep shape edges snapped to pixels - This might involve manually cleaning up shapes, lines and boxes if you're creating them in Photoshop.
• Make sure any text is created using the appropriate anti-aliasing setting - I use 'Sharp' a lot
• Ensuring contrast is high so that borders are clearly defined
• Over-emphasizing borders just slightly to exaggerate the contrast.

Further Reading:

I wrote a bit more about clarity in Elements of Great Web Design - the polish. I've noticed print designers transitioning to web design in particular don't think in pixels, but it really is vital.

Veerle does a great job of keeping even the tiniest details consistent across the board

9. Consistency

Consistency means making everything match. Heading sizes, font choices, colouring, button styles, spacing, design elements, illustration styles, photo choices... Everything should be themed to make your design coherent between pages and on the same page.

Keeping your design consistent is about being professional. Inconsistencies in a design are like spelling mistakes in an essay. They just lower the perception of quality. Whatever your design looks like, keeping it consistent will always bring it up a notch. Even if it's a bad design, at least make it a consistent, bad design.

The simplest way to maintain consistency is to make early decisions and stick to them. With a really large site however things can change in the design process. When I designed FlashDen for example, the process took months and by the end some of my ideas for buttons and images had changes so I had to go back and revise earlier pages to match later ones exactly.

Having a good set of CSS stylesheets can also go a long way to making a consistent design. Try to define core tags like <h1> and <p> in such a way as to make your defaults match properly and avoid having to remember specific class names all the time.

http://psdtuts.com/designing-tutorials/9-essential-principles-for-good-web-design/