Welcome to Imar.Spaanjaars.Com

As a software designer and web developer I usually focus on the back end of web sites and applications and leave the User Interface and UX design to people more knowledgeable. Still, occasionally I have the need to do some sketching and drawing with a customer, for example when designing a web interface or when working on use case documents. While paper and pencil often work fine, they lack durability. Additionally, the result is hard to share, especially with "digital" clients or clients in a different country. Over the years, I've been working with a number of software design tools to aid me in this process. Since I get asked which tools I use every now and then, I decided to write a short blog series outlining a number of these tools, including Balsamiq Mockups, Axure RP Pro, Microsoft Visio with the 'GUUUI Sketchy GUI Shapes' stencil, Pencil, and Microsoft's Sketchflow.

In this series I'll be (re)creating a design mockup for the Management section of my web site with each of the tools, giving you the opportunity to compare their output. You'll find a screen shot of the existing Management section at the end of this article.

Today's tool: Balsamiq Mockups.

Update 6/6/2010: the MVC version is already live at http://imar.spaanjaars.com and the MVC subdomain is no longer available.
I just uploaded the release candidate of my new web site built with ASP.NET MVC to my server.

As a developer and a beta-software fanatic, I tend to install and try out a lot of software. Some of it works well and adds value to my "developer toolkit". However, quite often the software is too buggy to work with, has a negative impact on my system's performance or leaves traces when uninstalled. Additionally, just using Windows and the installed applications tends to slow down a system after some time as well. Since having a speedy and responsive system is important for a productive developer, you need to find ways to keep your machine as fast as possible.

Over the years I found a good way to minimize the impact of these applications and Windows usage, enabling me to get my machine back in a clean state in just a few minutes. How?

Since a few weeks, separate chapters from three of my books are available on eBookPie.com.

When you think about testing an ASP.NET Web Applications you may be thinking about just a few topics. Maybe you're thinking about manual testing, where a tester goes through some scripts with a series of steps detailing the expected behavior of a web application. Or maybe you're a modern .NET developer, just making the move to the ASP.NET MVC framework, and have Unit Testing as the first topic that comes to mind when you hear the words Testing Web Applications.

Initially, this book review about Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson was going to be much longer.

I just uploaded a new version of my web site in MVC to mvc.spaanjaars.com. This new version has the following features:

• All data access is now done with repositories (using Entity Framework at run-time).
• My Controllers and repositories are fully testable.
• I am using Castle Windsor as my Dependency Injection tool to inject concrete repositories into my controllers at run-time or during testing.

A long time ago I worked on a web application for a large Dutch newspaper that provided access to all pictures that had ever been published in the paper, or were taken by photographers employed by the publishing agency. In total, there were around 250,000 pictures in the database used by the web application. One of the areas I worked on was the "picture list" that had features such as displaying, searching, filtering and paging of pictures. Things seemed to work fine on my machine, even with the large amount of pictures in the database. Until one day I worked from home.

They're here....

Today I noticed that my new book Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB is now available on Amazon.