Saturday, June 26, 2010

Search Engines vs. Decision Engines

Bing seems to have branded itself as something it calls a "decision engine" - whatever the heck that means.  I just did a search for "decision engine" (using my search engine) and the entry that came up told me that a decision engine is Bing!  So it seems to be a circular reference.

On Bing... I get pretty dismayed by the promotional team who mock up screens in the vain hope that they will lead us to believe that their "decision engine" is something more useful than it really is.  They artshop these elaborate landing pages which, on the face of it would lead to the early demise of search engines, wikipedia, and digital news services.

Alas, all it not as it seems.  The proof is always in the tasting (as they say), and so here we are, right in the midst of Soccer World Cup mania.  Everyone is talking about it.  The US are better positioned than they ever have been.  So let's do a Google vs. Bing bake-off and see what we get:

Here is Google (search engine):

Here is Bing (decision engine):

Decision made! :-)

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

ASP.NET MVC Data Validation

I've started to create a set of guidance for developers to show how to implement common validation concerns in business applications.  To that end I have created a sample project and an accompanying Guidance document to demonstrate these practices.  You can view a copy of these here:

What I would like next is to gather more complex scenarios and implement them.  If you have any requests for scenarios that you would like to see implemented, please leave a comment and I will look at adding it in.

Updates
3rd June - Updated to include a new recipe for validating against values bound to dropdown lists