Design
I have created a stencil for wire framing Windows Phone 7 application in Cacoo. This is definitely a work in progress, but until it is complete I would suggest combining this stencil with the Android stencil that is available by default in Cacoo. Below are a couple of screen shots of the stencil so far. First here is what the stencil window looks like currently. Taking a closer look the main device frame is illustrated below Lastly is the button pallet which contains the icons from the Windows Phone...
Posted On Monday, November 28, 2011 10:40 PM | Feedback (0)
While looking for a free alternative to Sketchflow I landed on the Cacoo web site. Any developer who decides to use the free Visual Studio tools may find themselves doing the same search. The base functionality of Cacoo is free although there are certain features that have fees attached to them such as extended stencils and templates. Cacoo doesn’t seem to have a template for WP7. It does have templates for iOS and Android development so I started with the Android template and started modidfying...
Posted On Monday, November 21, 2011 4:21 PM | Feedback (0)
The discovery phase of any project is both exciting and critical to the project’s success. There are several key points that you need to keep in mind as you navigate this process. The first thing you need to understand is who the players in the project are and what their motivations are for the project. Leaving out a key stakeholder in the resulting product is one of the easiest ways to doom your project to fail. The better the quality of the input you have at this early phase the better chance you...
Posted On Friday, November 18, 2011 2:55 PM | Feedback (0)
Ok, so maybe this is really why I need UX designers. While I have always had an interest in photography and can appreciate a well designed user interface putting one together is an entirely different endeavor. Being color blind doesn’t help, but coming up with ideas is probably the biggest portion of the issue. I can spot things that just don’t look like they work right, but what will? UX designers is an area that most companies do not spend much if any resources. As they say, you only get one chance...
Posted On Monday, November 14, 2011 9:40 PM | Feedback (0)
If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get. One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade. What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file. This is of course...
Posted On Thursday, November 10, 2011 6:56 AM | Feedback (0)
Eric White has put out a document generation example which uses XPath and Word Content Controls. I applaud Eric for the amount of work he has done with his exploration of different ways to perform template base generation. This is a subject that is challenging and we need as many ideas as we can get. There are a couple of areas that I see room for improvement in this XPath design that I would like to bring up. The first is that Eric has chosen to put his document generation in the document itself....
Posted On Thursday, March 31, 2011 6:49 AM | Feedback (0)
While converting some MySql databases to SQL Server I ran across this function. Confused by the lack of hints to its purpose in the name I did what any red-blooded IT person would do… look it up. It turns out that this function turns the string representation of an IP address into a long integer. What good that does I am still not sure, but here is the jist of the operation. (octet1 * 256^3) + (octet2 * 256^2) + (octet3 * 256) + octet4 Simple enough, right? Now for the real question. What the heck...
Posted On Tuesday, March 22, 2011 12:18 AM | Feedback (0)
Earlier this week Mike Vogt and I presented an introduction to design patterns. While I think that all developers should understand design patterns I don’t believe you can be a good architect unless you a firm grasp of patterns at at the application, system and enterprise levels. We had some fun with the subject by alternating between .NET and Java examples. I think if we had hidden certain parts of the IDE we could have challenged the attendees to tell us which example was in C# and which was in...
Posted On Thursday, October 21, 2010 5:02 AM | Feedback (0)
Design patterns are an important part of understanding the best practices of software development. Head First Design Patterns is another great book in the Head First series which takes a more story based teaching approach. As you get past the format of the book there are specific things that I like about the subject matter coverage. Rather than just laying out the name, problem and solution for each of the original patterns, they compare and contrast them. In some cases they even pull in patterns...
Posted On Wednesday, October 20, 2010 1:41 AM | Feedback (0)
For reasons that I will not discuss here the Chicago Architects Group has changed its name to the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group. It is the same great group of people discussing topics that are of interest to IT architects of all flavors. Whether your responsibilities are at an enterprise, solution or application level there is something here for you. For October the topic will be design patterns presented by Mike Vogt and myself. Mike has a Java background so we will be alternating...
Posted On Wednesday, September 29, 2010 7:38 AM | Feedback (0)
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