johna's blog

Visual Studio bug when deleting a line with word wrap enabled

2014-05-30T12:00:00+10:00

I have put up with a bug in Visual Studio for some time, but recently finally got around to reporting it. I need your vote to get this bug fixed.

When word wrap is enabled, if you use CTRL+X to delete a line that spans more than one on screen line, and your cursor is positioned on the first on screen line, it removes the first on screen line but leaves subsequent parts of the line and moves them up to the end of the previous line to the one deleted. This does not seem right. Deleting a line should delete the entire line even if it spans multiple on screen lines when word wrap is enabled.

Steps to reproduce:

Enable word wrap, create several lines of code, in the middle of the code add a line that spans multiple on screen lines, position cursor on the first line of that line, press CTRL+X

Because this bug has existed for so long, the Visual Studio team is reluctant to fix it unless users vote to fix it.

You can read more and vote at visualstudio.uservoice.com.

For more information including Microsoft's response see connect.microsoft.com.

While we are at it, there's a feature required in SQL Management Studio that is sorely needed. For those who who use Always On it is very frustrating that SMS does not remember the vital setting for connecting to an Always On enabled database.

For more information and to support this feature you please visit connect.microsoft.com.

Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

2013-01-17T12:00:00+10:00

Yahoo's Exceptional Performance team has published a number of best practices for making web pages fast on the Yahoo Developer Network.

See http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html for the full list but some of the highlights are:

Minimise HTTP requests by using CSS sprites, image maps and inline images.

Put Stylesheets on top (to the document HEAD).

Put Scripts at the bottom as they block parallel downloads, so may delay the loading of other resources like images.

Reduce the number of DOM elements to improve the performance of DOM access in JavaScript.

Split components across domains to maximise parallel downloads. You can create a couple of extra sub-domains for this purpose.

Minimuse the number of iframes.

No 404s: only show informative 404 pages where appropriate — not for images and JavaScript files.

Choose <link> over @import.

Keep components under 25K as the iPhone won't cache components bigger than 25K (uncompressed size).

Avoid empty Image src as some browsers will waste server resources handling these.

There's plenty more tips there so it is well worth a read.

jobs.nsw - web user interface design at its worst

2011-12-01T12:00:00+10:00

I was recently looking at the jobs.nsw job search page and was astounded at how such a high profile site could be so poorly designed.

The design is fine, my issue is with how it operates.

It's a dynamic site with AJAX and some animation of content areas appearing and disappearing. On some sites animation might be welcome, but this page's purpose is job hunting, and users like me don't want to wait while the search form disappears to make room for the search results which are displayed by AJAX on the same page.

Next problem, and this one is a big one. I get a bunch of search results and several of them are of interest to me. So I middle-click expecting the job details page to open in a new tab but it opens in the same tab. So I try right-clicking and select open in new tab. The new tab opens but I get a new search form, not the job detail page that I was hoping for and expecting.

So users are forced to view job detail pages in the same window, which means that we need to click back (browser button or hyperlink provided). This does take us back to the search results page and to give the developers some credit at least they coded in such a way that the search results and search form are populated with all the right details that were previously populated by AJAX - many developers don't handle this at all.

Personally, I generally avoid AJAX for search results as it is better for search engines to pick up content and allows users to bookmark search results pages.

Want more jobs.nsw usability problems? If I click on "job search" on the navigation bar it takes me to a page where I then have to click the big "job search" image which then opens the job search page in a new window.

I love sites that use lots of AJAX to avoid post backs, but they have to be (A) well designed, (B) quick (the AJAX on jobs.nsw is not fast), and (C) relevant to the content, not just AJAX for the sake of it.

Want an example of a good site with a lot of ajax, see stackoverflow. Leaving comments and answers on this site is such a smooth experience.