Aleem Bawany

Jang News: Advertising vs User Experience

The Jang News website is one that just keeps getting worse with each passing day. It's lacklustre and shows absolutely no concern for its readers or the news that it serves. The website is a big hoarding with no less than 19 advertisements on the website's front page while at the same time carries less than 100 words of actual news. And it looks really ugly to boot.

Online Strategy & Development in a Nutshell

Microsoft Innovation Center hosted the Microsoft Web Days session today where I gave a talk about online strategy and development (in a nutshell). Even thought it was in a nutshell, I slipped in some details which meant skimming over a lot of other things during latter part of the brief 30 minute presentation. The presentation covered frameworks, interaction design, business models, strategies, tools, trends and user experience among other things.

Tr.im Goes Open – Bad Move or Marketing Ploy?

Tr.im is a URL shortening services useful for applications like Twitter where the length of posts is restricted to around 140 letters and short URLs are desirable. Recently tr.im announced that it was going out of business and shutting down but soon after they reversed their position and Eric Woodward offered to bear the costs of operations out of his own pocket if donations fell short. A move that is probably even worse than shutting down.

Earnings Season

Earnings season is upon us. Today the DOW touched it's highest annual level of 9000 while the Nasdaq jumped 2.9%, it's twelfth daily consecutive gain. Following is a summary of interesting earnings highlights in the tech sector to show just where things stand.

JSON Serializers In .NET

I was introduced to the various serialization options in .NET while trying to build the JSON and XML filters for ASP.NET MVC. In this post I'll take a look at the different JSON serializers available in .NET and the reasons to pick one over the other.

New Features in Entity Framework 4.0 (V2)

Entity Framework 4.0 is just around the corner and it will bring some long awaited relief. I previously wrote and explained the issues around Persistence Ignorance and POCO as they apply to the Entity Framework. So obviously I'm quite excited about migrating from the interim EFPocoAdapter over to EF 4.0. Let's take a quick look at the new features in Entity Framework 4.0.

Properties vs Fields

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic and I only recently caught up and found some interesting gems from a variety of locations. Jon Skeet's article Why Properties Matter is a good starting point. Robert Paulson also has a comprehensive list of pros. Summary of the pros and cons follows.

YUI Compressor for NAnt

I had my first go with NAnt just a few hours ago and it was so easy, I am already porting my batch scripts over and creating build scripts with a few good examples off the web as my starting point.

Persistence Ignorance in ADO.NET Entity Framework

Serializing objects within the Entity Framework is a common enough scenario that I expected to work around it farily easily. Because as it turned out, the serialized objects only contained some additional undesirable key/value pairs that I did not expect. This is when I first got introduced to Persistence Ignorance.

Kodak Turns on its Online Users

Eastman Kodak Company (NYSE:EK) which lost nearly $1 billion for the quarter ended Dec '08 and has seen it's stock plummet over 75% in the past year, recently sent an email telling its customers that if you have been hosting pictures with Kodak Gallery, you are now going to have to pay up to retain those pictures or lose them (hope you made backups). Following is the recent email from Kodak.