Anyway, I decide to learn more about web services and the architecture behind that particular bit of terminology. It turns out that a “web service” is simply a standalone system that is designed to be truly interoperable with other standalone systems in an open, non-proprietary way.

The concept of web services is rather important, actually. Web services allow engineers to build robust, yet tiny, pieces of code that are able to interact with other robust, yet tiny, pieces of code elsewhere on the internet — with no knowledge of how those pieces of code actually work. All each web service needs to understand is what to provide and what to look for.

From a user interface designer’s standpoint, designing an application to utilize web services seems, frankly, natural. User interface designers make interfaces to applications in ways that require little-to-no training from a user’s or a developer’s end. If a beginner user can become an intermediate user right off the bat with no training, the UI designer has done his or her job. Good UI designers can create UIs that need no training. These UIs speak for themselves.

And, I suppose, that’s what web services do. They speak for themselves to other machines, such that the other machines require little-to-no training on how to use them. And ’cause of this, a web service is but a user interface for a machine!

The questions were fairly interesting and included things like “describe your most difficult technical problem” and “design a table using Microsoft Surface” — but I must say, the most gut-wrenching part of the whole thing was finding the room I was to be interviewed in.

You see, the email confirmation I received stated I’d be in Cory 553. I’ve spent plenty of time in Cory, but never on the 5th floor. Let me describe Cory Hall to you. Floors B-4: horrible, installation-interior, as if it came out of a badly-textured FPS. Floor 5: amazing, modern, museum-like, and full of neon lights and refined walls.

I was surprised by the coolness of the 5th floor, but I was more surprised at the fact that Cory 553 was non-existent. After spending ten minutes frantically pacing around the “Star Wars the Ride” halls of the fifth floor, I finally learned that “Cory 553″ was a typo, and the interview was actually to take place in Cory 533.

Moments later I sat, waited, interviewed, and left. With a new found discovery of Cory fifth floor and a reminder of my long time, dire hatred for typos.

Anyway, Microsoft’s latest is Dreamspark and under this brand, a bunch of pretty good MIcrosoft developer tools are being given away for free. Microsoft already gives great pricing to students through it’s “The Ultimate Steal” program as well as the MSDN Academic Alliance. In fact, under MSDNAA and an agreement with my school, all students enrolled in classes in the College of Engineering get all kinds of Microsoft software for free.

Dreamspark software includes an impressive, extensive list. Some of its highlights are Windows Server 2003, Expression Studio, Visual Studio 2008, and Virtual PC. Yeah, all for free. Pretty cool indeed. No sarcasm! I wish more companies (such as Adobe) would provide pricing models as competitive as Microsoft. I guess Microsoft’s view might be something like “rope them in while they’re young college students, then when they’re out in the real world they’ll have experience with our tools and create stuff with them.” It’s really quite a good model!

So where am I going to criticize Microsoft? Certainly not on the idea behind Dreamspark. I’ve already praised it many times. In fact, I’m downloading Expression Studio as I write this entry! My criticism lies in the quality and site design behind the Dreamspark page. I mean, really, how could this thing pass QA? It’s creative, sure. But it violates so many user interface web standards it’s not even funny! Margins are non-existant. The page is too wide and doesn’t scale down. The navigation and masthead are unexpectedly on the right. There’s little-to-no consistency in terms of text placement and font sizes.

No, that’s not a bad screenshot — that’s the way it looks in a browser!

I love the art. It’s the same overall design used on Microsoft’s Channel 8 website. But its implementation went sour. This site screams “great mock up artist” — then whoever sliced it up and created the code that spits out the HTML took a few wrong turns in the process. Oh well. It won’t stop me — and I’m sure many others — of taking advantage of Microsoft’s latest fantastic student software program.

Hit it up: Dreamspark!

Yumify! hooks in with data from Yelp! to provide restaurant recommendations based on each group member’s individual likes and dislikes. It sports features like AJAX page updating and autocompletion. I designed the HTML to use as little markup as possible.

Other interesting items we tackled with Yumify! included Google Maps integration, secure user authentication using MD5 hashes, and the age-old fun times of adhering to the usage agreements associated with the Yelp API.

I worked closely with the team to establish a site that was standards-based, easy to navigate, and focused on how a user would interact with the splash and inside pages. We focused on getting customer leads and the page featured interesting items like video demos, feature tours, and screenshot galleries. I used MooTools and scriptaculous to create some of the neat effects that served these purposes.

In addition to the web design, I integrated the new website with CMSMadeSimple — a CMS that supports version control and a media library. I also integrated the website with a third-party lead tracking application, SalesForce.

I learned it’s sometimes tricky to work with legacy, hacky code too. A very important skill for any webdev indeed.