Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

I noticed that there's a new skin available on the Nucleus Skins website: Stanch. It looks pretty neat, if you ask me.

Here's an annoyance I've stumbled across multiple times. The Nucleus website uses accesskeys for quick access to the menu items. e.g. Alt-D (Alt since I'm on a PC) will bring you to the downloads page.

Fine. So far. But Alt-D is also a browser-independent shortcut to jump to the location bar. "Browser-independent", as it works the same way in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So, my habit of hitting Alt-D constantly causes total confusion when I do it on the Nucleus homepage: Instead of getting the focus on the address bar, the downloads page loads.

So, why not use Ctrl-L? While in Firefox this is exactly the same as Alt-D, in Internet Explorer it isn't. You'll get the "Open Url..." dialog box instead. Close, but not what I want.

Whats the conclusion? The annoyances caused by keyboard shortcuts overruled by accesskeys are a perfectly good reason to NOT use accesskeys at all, or to limit the accesskey use to numeric values. (and even if you do so, try to stick to some standard assignments)

Here's a bunch of random links, most of them to interesting software I discovered lately.

• Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta is a stripped down version of the upcoming Visual Studio 2005. Beta versions of the express editions are currently available for free in a time-limited edition (afaik it expires on march 1st, 2005).

  What I most like about this program is that it's a pleasure to work with. It has also allowed me to experience the various improvements to Intellisense and debugging, some of which are really helpfull. The downside is that there's probably no way (haven't found any so far) to generate an assembly targetted for .NET v1.x. Everything you build with Visual C# can only be used when .NET v2.0 is installed.

• XML-RPC.Net: an XML-RPC library that you can use to easily implement XML-RPC servers/clients.

• Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 SP2: Microsofts .NET implementation for second-generation webservice standards like WS-Addressing, WS-Attachments, WS-Security, WS-Policy, ...

• .NET magazine, a dutch magazine which MSDN Belgium/Netherlands issues about 4 times a year. Subscribing is free.

• TcpTrace and ProxyTrace: little applications that help you debugging XML-RPC/SOAP communication by displaying what's going over the wire.

• The NP_BlackList plugin for Nucleus is a real timesaver. I installed it on dev.nucleuscms.org yesterday, after cleaning out 2000+ spam comments first.

• I've also been experimenting with nuSOAP and PHP. The result was the 10by10 webservice, which basically outputs the same data that 10x10 provides as a text file (developers info). Creating a web service in nuSOAP/PHP is a lot more complicated than doing so in C#. In some ways, this can be a good thing, as it forces you to learn a little more about how SOAP actually works.