SilverlightShow: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2 Comments

Re: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

sabu — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:32:26 GMT

Dear Chirs,

Could you send the following .dll to run your sample application

Blacklight.Silverlight.Controls

Cooper.Silverlight.Controls

DevExpress.AgDataGrid.v8.2

SilverlightMessageInspector

Thanks

Sabu Thomas

sabutp@gmail.com

Re: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

sabu — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:18:37 GMT

Dear Chirs,

Could you send the following .dll to run your sample application

Blacklight.Silverlight.Controls

Cooper.Silverlight.Controls

DevExpress.AgDataGrid.v8.2

SilverlightMessageInspector

Thanks

Sabu Thomas

sabutp@gmail.com

Re: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

chrisanderson — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:35:40 GMT

Hi CyclingFoodmanPA

Send me an email via my blog at http://chrisa.wordpress.com and I'll send them to you (I'm not sure why they're not in the zip file). That said, this sample is quite out of date (being for Silverlight 2), and a lot of stuff that this demo does is now built into Silverlight itself, or there are better ways of doing them. I have a book out on the topic (go to my blog, there's a link to it on Amazon there) which is more up to date.

Chris

Re: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

CyclingFoodmanPA — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:22:42 GMT

Hey Chirs,

Where can I get the Blacklight.Silverlight.Controls, Cooper.Silverlight.Controls, DevExpress.AgDataGrid.v8.2, and SilverlightMessageInspector to get this LOB application to work? It is exactly what I have been looking for.

Thanks CyclingFoodmanPA

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

Mauro — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:09:48 GMT

This is something that would have been very simple to do with asp.net, php , etc. I'm not sure what benefit Silverlight gives us here. Ajax could have been used to avoid postbacks. This application really isnt that good.

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

chrisanderson — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:39:31 GMT

Hi J&M

With Silverlight 3 there are some better ways to do what I have done in this article series. I'm now writing a book for Apress on this topic (due next year) so I've been focusing on that, with the new methods being covered in that. Unfortunately I don't have anything publicly available yet for you to follow. I will no doubt release some articles along the way, but right now I'm focusing on getting the book written. Basically instead of creating your own application framework like I did you can simply use the navigation framework in SL3. Instead of writing WCF services to expose data/operations you might want to look at RIA Services (this has pros/cons). For validating your business objects you might now want to look at Data Annotations. Instead of creating your own form and validation controls you can use the DataForm control in the Silverlight Toolkit. The reporting article is still valid, although it won't work in Out Of Browser scenarios. And my styling articles are still current. SL3 added a lot of functionality that wasn't available when I wrote these articles - through these articles I showed how to implement a lot of functionality that is now available in SL3, so you'd do it differently now. Brad Abrams has a good series of articles you might want to check out for doing a lot of this stuff in SL3 - and hopefully once my book is done I can point people to that (the book will be extremely thorough - aiming to discuss everything important to developers working on business applications).

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

J&M — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:32:01 GMT

We're just starting to learn Silverlight and came across your LOB tutorials. This is great stuff for us to learn from, however, with Silverlight 3 coming out we're wondering how this latest version affects your tutorial.

Are there parts that are no longer applicable because they're "available" or done better in SL3?
Do you have plans to update or rewrite your LOB tutorial to take advantage of any SL3 features?

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

chrisanderson — Tue, 05 May 2009 00:01:05 GMT

Hi Jonathan

There's no updated download for this article as the download will cover up to part 7.4 - the next update will be with part 7.5.

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

Jonathan Richey — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:05:07 GMT

Chris,

This example has been a life saver. Thanks.

Is there supposed to be a 7b.zip file to go along with the 7.2 article. The source link for part 7.2 is still pointing to the 7a.zip file.

-Jonathan

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

chrisanderson — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:14:25 GMT

Hi goldy. I do plan to cover implementing windows, but not until I start covering Silverlight 3 as there is much better support for creating windows there. So many topics, so little time :). Thanks for your feedback.

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

goldy — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:15:47 GMT

Hi Chris,

I saw the demo the application and was highly impressed. I found one thing lacking which I think is critical feature of LOB apps.

The MDI forms. currently your demo app represents only SDI form. I can work with only single product at a time . It would be great if i can view multiple products and perform different actions on them.

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

Bob Thomson — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:52:27 GMT

Thanks a lot for the coverage, it's much appreciated!

Bob

--
Bob Thomson
storm ideas
http://blog.stormideas.com
http://colaab.com
twitter: movingforwards

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

Parag Mehta — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:33:51 GMT

Thanks, It's a great discussion. I think it demands a more detailed article Chris(Designer/Developer workflow- how both guys work in sync etc) I will keep an eye on this blog :)

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

chrisanderson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:27:30 GMT

It's a good question. Billy makes an interesting point about agile being code-centric while interaction design is user-centric, but after thinking it through I have a slightly different perspective to offer. I personally don't see any conflict between prototyping and agile methodologies. Prototyping could be seen as a vehicle for creating a suitable design in an agile manner - the final prototype becomes the design. By having multiple prototypes you are experimenting with different designs to extract additional requirements from the client, and finding the most appropriate user experience to meet the given requirements. The changing requirements (one of the core principles in my opinion of Agile is the ability to respond to change) will be reflected in the user experience (ie. the user experience designer is responding to the client's needs in an agile fashion), and the developers respond in an agile fashion to the changes in the interaction design. So in a way, as I see it, prototyping and agile go hand in hand.

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

Billy Hollis — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:11:33 GMT

Re: prototyping and agile

I don't count myself as an agile proponent, though some aspects of my own methods would be recognizable to agilists. So not being an expert, I can't say with any authority whether detailed design is contradictory with agile. But...

1. I've heard agile proponents say up-front requirements gathering and design is orthogonal to agile. Agile doesn't prohibit them - it just doesn't explicitly prescribe a lot of that activity. (They will also maintain that you can't find out everything up front, and I agree, though I think we have differing opinions on how much you can feasibly find out up front.)

2. Agile is a means to an end, not an end in itself. To the extent that it fails to accomplish your ends, it doesn't make sense to adhere to it. If you really like it, but it doesn't meet your ends in some way, that would probably mean modifying it in some way so that it *does* meet your ends.

I think as advanced UI using WPF and Silverlight become more common, we'll see adaptations by agile proponents to formalize agile's approach to UI design processes. Someone's reputation is ready to be made if they can marry agile with interaction design in a coherent way.

This won't be as easy as falling off a log. To me, agile looks exceedingly code-centric and programmer-centric. Interaction design is design-centric and user-centric. I'll be interested to see how the agile community tries to bridge this gap. There are certainly possibilities. The rapid prototyping process that we use has a very agile-like feel to it.

A good look at the problem is contained in Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind. He discusses the need for what he calls "left-brain-leaning" workers who do procedural, analytical, detailed work (sounds like programmers, doesn't it?) to open up more to right-brain processes of synthesis, empathy with users, and abstract pattern recognition.

The whole left-brain, right-brain thing is an over-simplification, but it's still a useful model for the varying thought processes involved.

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

Parag Mehta — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:26:54 GMT

This is a great article.

WRT Billy's app, when I first saw his application in VSLive-Orlando 2008, I was really impressed with the application.

About Prototyping: can you please share how this all fits up in an agile process ? Detailed prototype requires detailed design upfront which is contradictory with agile development.

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

chrisanderson — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:52:49 GMT

I look forward to watching that session a lot Billy! I won't be there unfortunately, but hopefully it is filmed and made available on the web :). It will be very interesting to see how the StaffLynx application has evolved over the last 9 months or so - if it's a lot nicer than what you had previously I will be very interested to see what other innovative ideas you've come up with. It will be very interesting to see how you tackled the user experience design in the project, and how this evolved over time together with the user interface design. It's certainly interesting to hear that you had multiple interaction prototypes, and it obviously paid off doing so. Thanks for your comment, and if your session is online I will definitely be watching it!

Chris

RE: Building a Silverlight Line-Of-Business Application – Styling Part 7.2

Billy Hollis — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:18:49 GMT

First, thanks for calling out our StaffLynx application. It's in production now and user response has been gratifying.

You make several excellent point towards the end of this piece about how our new UI technologies affect the end-to-end process. Certainly the distinction between graphic designer and experience designer is important, as well as the idea that their work takes place at different points in the cycle. We've come to the conclusion for software-as-a-service, in fact, that much styling can be data-driven and dynamically applied at runtime to allow branding possibilities. Clearly interaction patterns cannot feasibly be done that way.

We also defer a lot of decisions on data templates to comparitively late in the dev cycle. It's so easy to change them, or to support multiple ones for different purposes, that we don't want to get sidetracked too early on those details.

Another point worth stressing involves prototypes. We are a big believer in multiple interaction prototypes, and in fact we did it for Windows Forms projects too. The big difference is that whereas we would only find two or at most three approaches to prototype in a typical Windows Forms app, it's not too hard to find four or five in WPF/Silverlight.

Such a process almost requires collaboration to generate enough ideas for several approaches. It's rare indeed to find an interaction designer capable of coming up with that many completely different approaches to a problem domain alone.

I'm doing a session at TechEd to show all the prototypes for StaffLynx and discuss what we learned at each step. I'll also be showing the finished product, which is quite a lot nicer than the very early version I did for .NET Rocks. The session ID is WUX-205.