Notes from the Portland .net user group meeting

Phil Weber presented at the meeting tonight.  The topic: UI Design Guidelines. 

It was an entertaining talk about bad UI design and what makes for a good UI.  He showed some cool demos using VB5, VB6, and VB.NET.  Very cool stuff.

A couple of Phil’s references:
Lutz Roeder’s web site for slick .NET class libraries for UI elements and other things. 
The “Magic“ user interface library for .NET
Alan Cooper's book: “About Face“ (RSS for Charity feed)

A couple of additional highlights:
The pizza place that was supposed to supply the pizzas for the group had some technical difficulties.  As a result we didn’t have any pizza for the meeting.  Can you imagine?  A room full of developers and no pizza in site?  All turned out quite well, though, when Chris (user group president) announced that we would stroll across the street to the Buffalo Gap Saloon for free food & drinks.  Cool!

At the pub I had the honor of sitting at a table with Scott Hanselmann, Duncan Macintosh, Rory Blyth, and Richard Propst (thanks Richard!).  Rory described his obligatory trip to Europe in which he saw a shop that sold (as the sign outside stated) postcards, tee shirts, groceries, and weapons.  Eh?  “And weapons”?