Originally published on my old Charteris blog

For the last year or so I have been working on the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) project at Microsoft and today it was released here (www.mscui.com) and on here on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/mscui).

The work released today comes from two areas of the ongoing work that Microsoft is doing in this area. First up is Design Guidance, this is a collection of best practice user interface guidance for clinical applications. Apologies for simply quoting the website but people smarter than me came up with the words so I might as well quote them

Design Guidance has been produced through a rigorous user-centred design process that incorporates primary and secondary research, usability testing, consultation with software providers and integrated hazard assessments. Patient Safety Assessments (PSAs) are continually performed to ensure the Design Guidance meets safety concerns.

The guidance is targeted at both existing clinical applications and those that are being designed and architected right now. The second part of this release is the implementation of much of that guidance in the form of control libraries for both WinForms 2.0 and ASP.NET. The website contains explanation and samples for each of the Web controls with the Codeplex project hosting a download of both the Winforms and the ASP.NET Control library.

The ASP.NET controls use much of ASP.NET Ajax and the extensions to that technology provided by the AjaxControlToolkit. There are some really handy controls on the site that I am sure you will find useful even if you are not working on clinical applications, take for instance the DateInputBox control.