Hacks

Lots of interesting links today:

Nice, simple presentation about experience design
The UX Driven Startup: Crafting an Experience

Google creates an application to teach developers how to prevent hacking
Google: Please Hack this Buggy Microblogging App

Wondering where Gowalla, Brightkite and Foursquare are leading?
Geomarketing: Ten Foursquare marketing campaigns

Ever wonder what the touch target size should be on a mobile? LukeW summarizes the current "standards"
LukeW on Touch Target Sizes read more...

The Setup

You have a double formatted as a string with the decimal part separated from the whole part by a full-stop, e.g. "1234.9". Of course, not all cultures separate their digits the same way, and in fact, the site you're working on has a locale setting for a locale that uses a comma to separate the integer from the decimal, and vice-versa, e.g. German:"1.234,9" or French "1 234,9" style digit grouping. For the sake of argument, let's also say the decimal number is being parsed out of an XML file input by a US or UK user and that a full-stop is meant to separate the whole and fractional parts of the number.

The Problem

ASP/VBScript's clever and useful FormatNumber and FormatCurrency functions which solve oh-so-many related problems are no help:

SetLocale("de-DE")
'This is what we want (notice no quotes below)
FormatNumber(1234.9) '-> 1.234,90

'This is what we get (when using a string)
FormatNumber("1234.9") '-> 12.349,00
FormatCurrency("1234.9") ' -> 12.349,00 €
'ARGH!

When in a German locale, FormantNumber sees the string "1234.9", it assumes that the full-stop is merely a misplaced thousands separator and drops it. Though I was confused and angry at this behavior at first, I have come to see the sense that it makes (consider interpreting "1.234" in a German locale).

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Of course Visual Studio 2005 doesn't compile for .NET Framework v1.1. Of course you can't (easily) buy Visual Studio 2003 new. Who would want to do that? Well, me for one; at least until Adobe releases some Flash Remoting components for .NET v2.0.

In lieu of any built-in backwards compatibility support from Microsoft, there are a number of community solutions for Flash/Flex developers who through one circumstance or another are using VS2005 (or, of course, anybody else who wants to target v1.1 from VS2005). Microsoft has adopted MSBee as a VS Powertoy, so I guess that's as close to official as you're gonna get -- It's even got a fancy .msi installer. Jomo Fisher's blog entry explains what I suspect is going on under the hood of MSBee, and Gustavo Guerra created a build targets file that includes Mono and .NET Compact Frameworks, though it seems to be missing from Gustavo's link in that forum entry.

Of course, you could try to go the other way and fix Remoting instead of Visual Studio, which is what the developers of Flourine are trying to do with an Open Source (GNU Lesser GPL) Remoting library which supports both .NET v1.1 and v2.0. You have to build the gateway dll yourself, but once you do, you can use the wizard they provide for VS2003 or VS2005 to create and configure a project for your Remoting services.

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