Are you sure? How many times have you been asked that question by your computer when you wanted to delete something?

I don’t know about other folks, but I answer yes to that question about 99.9% of the time, even when I wasn’t really sure. It’s just habit. I’m as guilty as the next programmer of polluting my software with Are you sure? confirmations.

However, in my latest application, my customers really want a nice user experience. In addition to Web 2.0 features, I decided to abandom the delete confirmation and instead, offer an undo button. There’s a gridview on the page, and if you click the red X next to a row, it deletes, no questions asked. It also stores the deleted object in the session state and enables the Undo button. It’s just a one level undo, but I could have easily made a stacked list and pushed and popped the items. In most cases, a one level undo suffices.