Talk about Technologies, Software Architecture and Management

Which came first – the chicken or the egg – WPF, Developers and Designers – old tale

Nothing is more of the truth then old tales. Some long time ago Sean Sexton said If you’re a developer doing WPF development, you really need to be using Expression Blend. Yes, I know the party line on WPF development runs something like this: Every Dev team should have at least 1 developer and 1 designer Developers can’t design decent-looking GUIs to save their soul Designers can’t be trusted with code, or anything close to code (excepting XAML) Devs will open a project in Visual Studio and do all of their work there Designers will open the same project in Blend and do all of their work there Devs wear button-up shirts that don’t match their Dockers Designers wear brand-name Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

UI prototypes and iPad/iPhone wireframes

Working on earlier design of the new system there are different ways in approaching UI design – from white board, favorite piece of napkin to modeling tools. Well, one can skeep it all together and jump into Visual Studio or Eclipse and start jamming together some nice forms. Experience shows again and again that using prototyping in software development allows shaving hours, days or even months from release schedule. From various types of concepts and prototypes UI prototypes are most difficult and if missed could kill any project down the road. Setting proper UI expectations, creating reference materials for your project plan, getting earlier feedback from potential or existing customers – benefits are many. How elements are placed on the screen? What themes/colors/styles Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Hello again or returning to old self

Merry Christmas!!! It has been a while since my last post. Many things has changed – I have took on a new challenge changing the job and moving back to California. And wasn’t it a great decision! With new job I have moved away from Delphi. In fact, I probably now do more in PHP then in Delphi. Yet, it is a C# which is main Dev language for me now. Do I regret using Delphi for many years? No. It was a great ride. But, at some point it is coming to what is more relevant for the projects you are taking on. So, what do I do? Silverlight/WCF/WPF/SQL Server/Reporting Services even developing for iPad/iPhone/Mac – anything what delivers what Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

How to add key navigation to your web-site

This is probably an old topic which still raises here and there. Day ago while waiting for delayed flight on United, I was doing some follow up on the discussion about my Theme for Gallery 3 and was asked if I could add support for Keyboard navigation. In general, it is easy topic, especially when jQuery is supported for the web-site. An objective is to allow visitor use keyboard to navigate. In my case it is applied to Gallery pagination enabling use of Left/Right/Up keys to move between photos or album pages. While being simple in implementation, it adds a convenience for the end user enabling keyboard navigation versus mouse clicks. So let’s add it… First, we need some “anchors” on the Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

PHP, MySQL and error “2006: MySQL server has gone away”

As a hobby I like to do little photography. Same time I do not like to give my photos to someone else to host, so I have my gallery. It runs on Menalto’s Gallery 3 engine – nice, open source, PHP based with MySQL back-end. Not my primary programming language, but allows me to host and enhance my blog, keep my gallery and small web-site. Last night, while bringing some old photos over from my backup gallery (G3 is still under development and I do not want to recreate gallery if anything to happen, and it did – I killed the setup…), I noticed that import process start to fail. Several attempts to recover did not give much of the Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Crystal Reports 2010 – rumors are out

It has been two years since Crystal Reports 2008 was released. It feels old now – no support for new .Net technologies, no support for new export formats, etc. So question is – when we would see any of this? Accordingly to Blair Wheadon,  Product Manager in the Volume Business Unit at SAP, our cries may be answered relatively soon. Post is a nice summary and I hope features discussed would be in the final product. Few highlights I pick for myself and with comments: Crystal Reports Basic will no longer be included in Visual Studio 2010 Finally! Every time I have to set-up Visual Studio environment, I have to make sure I do not bring CR Basic along since I have a full Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago