model view presenter

I just started part three of my book Sam’s teach yourself WPF in 24 hours. In this part we are going to use the model view presenter pattern.I’ve used this in the past and i liked it very much.

I’m excited to start on my next project using WPF.

Dragon naturally speaking 10

Together with my copy of Sam’s teach yourself WPF in 24 hours, I bought a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I have set up two users one for my native language Dutch and another one for English.

So far I am very pleased with the results, actually I’m speaking to my computer right now so all this in my previous post are spoken rather than typed.

I haven’t used the system very much yet. It is amazingly flawless, albeit it does make a mistake here and there. I do believe that when you correct your errors it does learn from it. So I guess using it more often should improve the quality.

Actually the idea of starting to talk to the PC is something I’ve tried with Dragon NaturallySpeaking eight and I was not very impressed at that time. The new version however is way better than the previous.

I haven’t started to learn how I can send commands to my PC, but that should be doable to. One of the best things I find so far is that you never make grammar mistakes. It is always correct.

Finally started on WPF

Last Friday I bought myself a book called Sam’s teach yourself WPF in 24 hours.

I have just finished the seventh hour and so far we have profits application layouts, basic controls, data binding and how to design an application.

So far I am quite impressed with the way WPF works and I think it’ll be very useful in designing new business applications that are more user-friendly user oriented and just get things done faster.

When you are used to working with Windows forms it is quite a steep learning curve because it is so very different.there are a lot of controls that work just a little bit differently than what you’re used to in Windows forms.

It is obvious that I won’t be able to grasp everything WPF has to offer from reading this book alone but it is a place to start.

Currently myself and some colleagues are looking to build a new business application and we are investigating whether we would like to use WPF as opposed to Windows forms.

My mission statement says that we will invest constantly in research for new market evolutions to add leverage to new projects.

I strongly believe that xaml will grow up to be a common language for all of Microsoft’s presentation technologies such as server like ASP.net and Windows client development. Maybe it could even serve as a language for technologies that have not yet been invented or at least not released to the public.

I am sure though that WPF is here to stay.

Flock Browser

Well, I downloaded the Flock Browser and I’m blogging from the blog editor in it. Nice work guys!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

New website

I’ve finally updated my website today.

For now it is only in Dutch. Sorry for all you English speaking folk. I plan to get a multilingual version up in the next two weeks or so.

I got the design from http://www.freecsstemplates.org/. I could have spent a few euro’s on a custom design but I was happy with it so…

However, I did start from the downloaded HTML and converted it to use ASP.NET master pages and ASP.NET controls.

The content is not yet finished either but at the moment I’m very busy getting my new app out for Communication Management. I’ll write a seperate post on that shortly.

New Product: Communications Logging

A customer of mine log all incoming and outgoing comunication with his external relations in an excell spreadsheet. I find this a very good  thing to do. He confirms it has helped him numerous times in the past where his customer or vendor gets into a i-did-say-this argument. He can fall back on the communication log an say you said this and that on that day an such.

The spreadsheet did however pose some problems, keeping him from getting the efficiency he needed.

These were his problems:

• When multiple users accessed the sheet, they had to be very carefull not to overwrite each others entries.
• The master data for contacts is in their Microsoft Dynamics NAV system. It is a shame he has the same data in multiple places.
• He cannot run a report from the contact card in NAV to see a log of the communications
• Some users of the Communications Log do not require access to Navision. They don’t even want access. Fact is that NAV licence pricing is user based.

So, he came to me to see if I could address these problems. Of course I could. The first idea we had was to just write some custom solution in NAV. Then I started seeing an opportunity. Surely other businesses could benefit from such software.

Because we wanted to enable non NAV users to use the software we were pushed towards an external app anyway. So, I decided to write an app in ASP.NET. In this first release, I’m focussing on NAV as a the backend. The software is designed pluggable however. This means that I can write a module to access systems other than NAV in a jiffy.

As a marketing stint, I said to the customer that for avery lead he can generate that leads to a sale, he will get free services from me. I tend on pursuing this further for all paying customers.

The software is priced at 500€ ex vat. For every buying lead, I will give back 125€ ex vat in services on the software (such as customisation or maintenance or upgrades).

If anyone is interested in this, please contact me. I have other reward programmes in mind for lead generation.

Gaia Ajax Widgets

I’ve often said to achieve enything you have to invest. Either money or time.

Now, I don’t have tonnes of money to spend. Most of us µISV’s don’t.

So, what do I have? Time. But not a lot of it. I as an µISV want to bring my software ideas to market. WIll they sell? I don’t know. Who can? If I would be sure, I’d get some funding somewhere and build it.

What is my strategy then?

All my ideas for software, I want to make. I want to make them fast. Every piece of software should be good in terms of quality (or else it comes back to haunt you…).

But for that, I need tools to create software. I used ASP.NET Ajax control toolkit until now but I constantly ran into rendering and postback problems (among other). This was taking up so much of my time I wasn’t really getting to putting the software on the market.

Now a new customer of mine asked me to build him a peice of software to manage incoming and outgoing communication in his company.

I decided this too would make a great piece of software to add to my products list, so I set out on building it.

Recently I did a lot of research on other toolkit out there that could easily integrate with ASP.NET. I did not find anything that was remotly interesting. Last week I had another go at finding a toolkit. I happened to stumble upon Gaia Ajax Widgets.

MARVELOUS!!!

I’m using it now to build a user control (maybe turn it into a server control) to be a generic lookup form. I learned the UI style from my Nav days and it is truly wonderfull.

I will keep you posted on my progress.

Been a while

Sure has been a while since my last post… So what have I been doing?

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting work for a Dutch company calles Qurius.

The end customer was BIS Industrial Services. They do insulation, scaffolding and a host of other services.

What I did for them was create a portal for their remote employees for registering time spent on projects. They register time for about 3000 employees. This is done by about 35 administrative employees.

The technology used was ASP.NET 2.0 on IIS6. The backend was Microsoft Dynamics Nav.

Where am I going?

I’m doing a small µISV project which has allready been sold for a company in Roeselare. They want a small program that allows them to register communication between the company and external contacts. They have been doing this for years an see real added value in this business process.

Until now, they have been registering their communications in an excell spreadsheet. This of course has some drawbacks in a multiuser environment. Another major drawback is that their contact details are in their Microsoft Dynamics Nav System.

Yes, that Nav again. I did design the app to allow for a pluggable dataaccess though, so it can easily be coupled to other software. The app is in C# ASP.NET and I’m probably not going to use the ajax control toolkit but rather Gaia Ajax Widgets.

I will probably post about my experiences with those in the next few days.

MySQL is giving us a hard time

I used to love MySQL!

 It was fantastic you found what you needed immediately, you downloaded it, no questions asked. You installed it and you where up and running in no time. It was simply the best DB I had ever had.

These days, if you go to the MySQL website, it is certaily not obvious where to go to download the free version. A lot of blabla for their enterprise version but the rest is very obscure. A first time user would not know immediately there is such a thing as a free version.

There is a small link in the top of the website that says “community”. When I see a “community” link, I think of open source developers, support forums, blogs etc. I do not immediately think that there could be another version which I could maybe download there.

They call it the “Community Version”, tsss. But where to get it? I had to google a while to get pointed in the right direction. When I finally wanted to download the 5.1 community version, I got to a page where at first it seems you have to register go on. There is just a small link that is not obvious that say ‘no thanks…’ But when I clicked it, it did absolutely nothing!!!

This could be due to some bozo IE setting but anyway, it should just work!

In the end I did manage to download it and in retrospect it seems logical how they organised the community download but I did not find it intuitive. I strongly believe I’m not the only one.

 Anyway, if I think about the way things where with MySQL and where they come from and their attitude today, I don’t get a lot of warm feelings…

We’ve come a long way since 1984!

Today I was thinking a bit about where I’ve come from since my first computerdays. I was searching youtube for old demos and presentations and this is one I really liked. It is Steve Jobs giving a demo of Machintosh back in 1984.

Look at the crowd: they go nuts!