Jon Hartmann

SQL Server Can't Handle Milliseconds

• October 19, 2010 10:36 AM
• Microsoft Tools
• Comments (3)

I've started up a new job, and one of the tasks I'm going to have to tackle is creating a system where nearly every record has an effective date: only the information with the most current date that has happened so far is considered in use. This means that I've got to do some crazy date manipulation to keep things running smoothly. While working on some stored procedures, I found an issue with SQL Server and its handling of datetime values when incrementing in milliseconds.

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Great User Experience Article at Smashing Magazine

• October 5, 2010 8:27 AM
• User Interface Design
• Comments (0)

I'm usually not one to just repost links on my site, but Smashing Magazine has an awesome article on User Experience Design that serves as a great overview of the field, and an introduction to its importance and role within a project. Check out What Is User Experience Design? Overview, Tools And Resources at Smashing Magazine.

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Getting Started with IE9: Pinned Applications and Jumplists

• September 15, 2010 9:01 PM
• Browsers, Microsoft Tools, Web Trends, Examples & Tutorials
• Comments (3)

Internet Explorer 9 is here, and if you're anything like me, you're happy to see the wide world of the web moving forward. If you're anything like me, you're also looking at IE9's new "Pinned" websites, and thinking "Man that looks spiffy". I set out to convert my website into a pinnable application on my Windows 7 task bar, and I'm going to walk you through getting your site setup for it as well.

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First 3 Minutes with IE9

• September 15, 2010 7:39 PM
• Browsers, User Interface Design, Microsoft Tools
• Comments (1)

So, first three minutes with IE9, and my thoughts are:

• The new interface looks spiffy.
• Cufon is broken in IE9, so my site looks terrible.
• What kind of idiot thought it would be a good idea to make an undifferientiated part of the clear area at the top of the browser launch new tabs instead of maximizing the window on double click?

Double-clicking in the portion of the top of the window where the tab bar would extend to causes a new tab to appear instead of maximizing the window. There is no visual differientiaton to indicate where the cutoff point between these two behaviors is located. Thats a usability fail right there.

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Internet Explorer 9 (Beta) Released

• September 15, 2010 3:22 PM
• Browsers, User Interface Design, Microsoft Tools, Web Trends, Software
• Comments (0)

The Beta of Internet Explorer 9 was released today. I'm usually not excited by IE, but man, anything that stands a chance of knocking IE6 further down the road is a good thing in my book.

Ars Technica has a great article covering IE9, so I wont go into specifics, but I will say that while Microsoft's done some typically stupid things (the UI... yuck), it is a very compliant browser, and hopefully will let us really move forward with HTML5 and some advanced styling. Look for some post from me about what kind of CSS tricks we can hopefully treat as standard now that IE is "back in the game".

Download IE9

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Code I Found: A Warning about Object Comparisons

• August 27, 2010 2:24 PM
• General
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Last time I posted a "Code I Found" entry some people got upset... well I'm doing it again, but I'm pairing it with an actual warning about object value comparisons in strongly typed languages. This example shows both a valid problem and some dumb coding that complicates it.

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