Often, we use wire-framing or mock-up tools (like the good guys at Balsamiq) to help communicate design ideas between developers as well as to clients. However, there is a need for something more efficient to aid communication of possible user interface flows through our emerging application. This communication is for internal use typically and doesn’t need to approximate the appearance of the final product in any way – it’s just a means to explore the pathways through the program without getting side-tracked by the scenery along the way.

Ryan at 37Signals posted a very interesting way of addressing this issue. As you can see it seeks to communicate the movement between states more effectively. It also avoids getting bogged down with the detail of each representation of state, focusing instead on the salient aspects to each (probably, well-known) state.

The horizontal line separates what the user sees on the screen (topside) from what action he (can) take (bottom-side). Here’s a more detailed example Ryan provides:

As you can see it very succinctly captures the pathway that the user takes through the process of adding an item to a ‘To-Do List’. Building on this Ryan offers equally compact means to capture multiple choices of action by the user:

The dashed lines separate alternative actions that the user can choose from, each naturally leading to alternative views from where further actions can be selected. I like Ryan’s reminder at the end that all these drawings are ‘destined for the garbage’ – like all prototyping and similar tooling, they are part of the process, not the product. The longer they linger the less use they serve.

One of the challenges of working in the Mac environment while developing in Microsoft technologies is getting the VM machine working as you want. Being a fan of keyboard shortcuts, it’s a major PITA if the key mappings aren’t set as you’d expect, especially as I move routinely between Mac and Windows PC.

So, with my Parallels 7 and Windows 8 setup, do the following to get it just right:

1. In Parallels, choose Preferences…Keyboard and ensure Virtual Machine Shortcuts are off.
2. At the bottom of that box, I leave ‘Enable Mac OSX system shortcuts’ enabled to give me the Fn controls across the top of my keyboard. This means I have to press Fn with, say, F6 to compile in VS2012 but that’s how I prefer it.
3. That’s all she wrote.

There’s an issue when you try to attach a local MDF SQL database file to the local instance of SQL Express. VS typically will insert a USER INSTANCE = true into the connection string that it generates when you add the LINQ-to-SQL or ADO.NET Entity modelling to your project.

The connection to the database as attached to SQL EXPRESS will fail on open. Fix this by removing the User Instance clause from the connection string.

Other solutions advise deleting the SQL Express folder from the AppData folder for the user but I found the first options works for me and doesn’t require any privileges on the host machine.

IIS Express

This problem has visited me a few times and like such problems you quickly forget what the cause/cure was. The problem is manifested when you run a debug session in Visual Studio (I use VS2010 in a Parallels VM for what it’s worth). The issue is changes that I make to the code and save should be immediately available to me in the browser following a refresh (F5 or similar). Instead, the site page served is that of the (now) older file.

The usual solution I’ve worked with was to kill the localhost session, recompile and run prompting another development server to spawn and all was fine. However this seriously hits the development process.

The solution that works is to ditch the built-in VS development server. I had done this before for other reasons and installed IIS Express – a lightweight version of IIS with the following benefits:

• It doesn’t run as a service or require administrator user rights to perform most tasks.
• IIS Express works well with ASP.NET and PHP applications.
• Multiple users of IIS Express can work independently on the same computer.

You can even write batch files to spawn a IIS Express process for deployment purposes. Anyhow, this *almost* fixes the problem.