October 2010
Beginner to intermediate
624 pages
24h 9m
English
Content preview from Making SoftwareBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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If At First You Don’t Succeed...
The next opportunity to study API usability came 18 months later. With my colleagues in the Visual Studio user experience team, I worked on a study that investigated whether experienced Visual Basic 6 developers could write .NET applications using the Visual Basic .NET language.
Visual Basic .NET is the latest version of the Visual Basic programming language, and it departs radically from earlier versions of Visual Basic, such as Visual Basic 6. Most notably, the .NET framework used to write programs in Visual Basic .NET provides similar functionality to Visual Basic 6 frameworks, but is composed of a completely different set of classes and namespaces. There are other differences as well. For example, in Visual Basic .NET, the default lower bound of every dimension of an array cannot be changed from 0 to 1 as it can be in Visual Basic 6.
Our team wanted to evaluate the experience of developers using Visual Basic .NET for the first time to perform common tasks such as writing to and reading from text files on disk. Having learned our lesson from the card sort study on the ATL Server API, we decided that in this study, we would provide participants with a specific task and observe them in our usability labs performing those tasks. We would videotape each participant and ask them to talk out loud as they were performing the task. We would then analyze each video to look for common patterns of behavior, interesting highlights, and any evidence that could ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.