Usability and Discoverability (also referred to as Learnability) are often confused with one another, but they really are distinct concepts. In Joel Spolsky’s wonderful User Interface Design for Programmers (go read it!), Joel provides an metaphor to highlight the difference.

UPDATE: Due to differences in the way that ASP.NET MVC 2 processes request, data within the substitution block can be cached when it shouldn’t be. Substitution caching for ASP.NET MVC is not supported and has been removed from our ASP.NET MVC Futures project.

UPDATE: I updated the prototype to work against the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM. Keep in mind, this is *NOT* a backport of the the ASP.NET MVC 2 feature so there may be some differences.

With the release of ASP.NET MVC Beta, the assemblies distributed with ASP.NET MVC are automatically installed into the GAC.

Whew! I’ve finally found a bit of time to write about my impressions of the PDC 2008 conference. If you’re looking for insightful commentary and a “What does this all mean” post, you’ve come to the wrong place. There are plenty of others providing that sort of commentary. I’ll just string together some random impressions and pics from my perspective.

In my last post, I joked that the reason that someone gave me all 1s in my talk was a misunderstanding of the evaluation form. In truth, I just assumed that someone out there really didn’t like what I was showing and that’s totally fine. It was something I found funny and I didn’t really care too much.

Before giving a presentation, I review Scott Hanselman’s top 11 presentation tips. Well I have a twelfth tip that Scott needs to add to his list, and he’ll vouch for this.

The sample project code is on GitHub. You can play with the code as you read this blog post.

I just can’t help myself. I said I wouldn’t be one of those parents, but forget it. I am one of those parents. I think my kid is adorable, so sue me. Check out Cody’s halloween costume. He’s with his BFF Forever, Alex the Panda.

Today we finally officially released the beta of ASP.NET MVC (go download it already!).

Today marks my one year anniversary at Microsoft. Tradition dictates that I bring in a pound of M&Ms for each year that I’ve been an employee. I’m going to buck that trend (because I like bucking things) and bring in 1 kilo of Japanese candies. Since I just returned from a trip to Japan and it is also customary to bring gifts back from a trip, this ends up killing two birds with one stone. Software is not the only place to apply the DRY principle.

I’ve used the term “drinking from the fire hose” when describing my first days at Microsoft. However, I believe that a lot of our customers feel this way when approaching the plethora of options for web application development on the Microsoft stack.

UPDATE: Pretty much disregard this entire post, except as a reminder that it’s easy to make a mistake with DOCTYPEs and markup. As many people have told me, I had an error I didn’t notice in the original HTML. I forgot to close the SELECT tag. I’ll leave the post as-is.

Just got back from our trip to latest Japan yesterday morning. On previous trips, I ate really great Yakitori, ate Blowfish and lived to tell about it, celebrated the new year, , learned about ritual suicide and played around with sharp swords, visited a temple in the midst of old Tokyo, and visited the hotel from Spirited Away.

I had a bit of a rough start to my first Tech-Ed Hong Kong last week. Pretty much every day while I was in Japan, I dutifully pulled out the laptop (despite my lack of internet connection) and made sure it still worked fine.

Where have I been? ;) You probably heard the news already from the GU already, but just in case, we will be shipping JQuery with Visual Studio. ASP.NET MVC will have the privilege of being one of the first products to include JQuery. I am glad we finally announced this because I got tired of stifling my mouth everytime someone suggested we just include JQuery. :)

The internet access I had at my mother-in-law’s last time I was in Japan turned out to be a fluke. I am at a Japanese Manga and Internet cafe (because those three things go so well together) right now typing this out. I’ve received a lot of comments and questions via my blog and once I get to Hong Kong, I will do my best to answer.

This afternoon we released a refresh of our DLR/IronPython support for ASP.NET, now called “ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support”, on our CodePlex site.

If you happen to be in Asia around October 8-10, I’ll be speaking at Tech-Ed Hong Kong. Come by and say hi. I’m giving three talks, one on each day.

First of all, I want to congratulate Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and their team for the release of StackOverflow.com. If you haven’t tried it out, I highly recommend giving it a shot. Be prepared, it’s addicting.