John Watson

This post is part of a series which discusses the journey I took building a smart client membership application using Microsoft's Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF). You can navigate the entire series from here.

Several years ago I developed a .NET code generation tool based on XSLT. It evolved over time and even had a front-end GUI to enable selection of various templates as well as database schema browsing. I had to hack my way through the INFORMATION_SCHEMA output of databases and developed an XML schema representation of the data model to drive the XSL templates. Of course, about six months after I had a working version Kathleen Dollard published her book Code Generation in Microsoft .NET and I could've saved myself a lot of effort if I'd just waited.

Read the full article...

This post is part of a series which discusses the journey I took building a smart client membership application using Microsoft's Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF). You can navigate the entire series from here.

The membership application is primarily about tracking and managing memberships in an organization such as a church or synagogue, small club or user group, sports team or league, etc. In the case of our church we need to track both individual persons and households. People may give us cell phone as well as home phone numbers and we mail our weekly newsletter to people who couldn't attend worship. Thus phone numbers can be associated with an individual person or a household and, of course, households have physical addresses for mailing purposes - we wouldn't mail two copies of a newsletter to a couple but rather one copy to their household address.

Read the full article...

This post is part of a series which discusses the journey I took building a smart client membership application using Microsoft's Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF). You can navigate the entire series from here.

My first approach was to fire up trusty old MS Access to build a single database even though I knew that sharing information wouldn't be easy yet is possible. I've used Access off and on since it was first introduced and even resurrected some screen shots (here, here, and here) using Virtual PC to run Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

Read the full article...