Just doing some getting caught up from my holiday recently and I was reminded of a “line of business” application that was completed in Silverlight for the United States Army. It is a bit of a supply chain management application…where the supply is soldiers!
This is a pretty cool application that was taken from a full client (Windows Forms) application and brought to Silverlight by ProModel. They specialize in supply and demand issues. Take a look at the interview/demo that Adam Kinney did with Dan Hickman of ProModel. Sure, it would have been cool to have a drill sergeant do the demo, but I’m guessing they are busy right now.
What is pretty cool is that ProModel chose to use IdeaBlade’s DevForce Silverlight to implement the solution. Using this helped them get from zero to something quickly and not worry about plumbing and integration code. Some of the user experience for the assignments as well (as seen in the demo) was pretty cool. Some other background behind the solution:
Hearing Dan talk about it and seeing the final product, it seems like they were really able to concentrate on the end-user interaction with the experience without re-learning a lot of data access with Silverlight. Check out the demonstration above and also be sure to check out the solution they used, DevForce Silverlight!
(and yes, I know that Lee Ermey is a Marine, but c’mon…isn’t he *the* drill instructor?)
I’ve been doing a lot of asking and listening lately…to you, the Silverlight developers! I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and “thank you for asking” comments and it has been real encouraging. If you haven’t seen some of them, here’s some of my recent inquiries:
If you have thoughts on these, please share them at the links above. We’ve also been capturing ways of looking for feature suggestions. One experiment has been using a ‘wisdom of crowds’ type approach. Previously Joe Stegman (group director for the Silverlight runtime) had spelunked the forum questions, blogs, etc. Check out what he has to say (emphasis mine) about a recent effort to collect some suggestion feedback:
Tim Heuer and Scott Barnes have established a more community focused way of tracking Silverlight 4 feature requests. You can find their feature tracker here: Silverlight Feedback Forum. Other than a few items that our outside our control (iPhone, bundling), you're likely to see at least a few of the top items in the next version of Silverlight. source: Joe Stegman.
Hmm…some hints to the future?! :-)
Thanks for all your feedback and keep it coming!
For those that may use my Foxit PDF Previewer (for use with Outlook 2007 or Windows Vista and Windows 7), I wanted to provide a few updates.
Blank white screen previews
I’ve been getting quite a few reports lately about white screen previews while the PDF file renders fine in other readers. After some research and patient testing with some of you that reported it, it’s been determined that the consistent piece is that the PDFs were documents that were scanned. These documents in the PDF format contained a different format of encoded images. The current incarnation of the Foxit PDF Previewer does not have the decoder embedded within the product. Here is the workaround to get it to work:
- Download the JPEG2000/JPIG decoder file directly from Foxit: JPEG200 Decoder.
- Take the contents of that ZIP file (fxdecode1.dll) and place it in the directory where you installed the Foxit PDF Previewer (if you accepted all the defaults it will likely be c:\Program Files \Tim Heuer\Foxit PDF Preview Handler)
- That’s it !
The decoder library isn’t currently licensed for me to distribute with the previewer and thus this workaround. It may be possible in a future version that this functionality will be built in, but this is a minor workaround. The decoder is built into the Foxit SDK for version 3 (the previewer uses version 2).
Outlook 2010 Technical Preview
I have also received some comments from beta testers of Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview. These reports have indicated that the previewer does not work in 64-bit mode for Outlook. I can confirm this to be true. I’ve logged a bug with the Outlook developer team to track this issue and will make any modifications necessary to make it work. Please feel free to subscribe here for Foxit PDF Previewer specific updates (you may also subscribe to my main feed as well).
I would like to remind participants of the Office 2010 technical preview program of any confidentiality agreements they may have agreed to and to respect those in public. If you are a part of the program, please log an official bug with the Outlook 2010 program channels with regard to Foxit Previewer not working…this will help my cause :-).
That is all. Thanks for being a user of the software and as always, thanks to Foxit Software for being such a great partner to provide the licensing of the SDK for this software to exist. They make other great PDF software so be sure to check them out.
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. I read a lot of them, and a lot I skim. But I also make sure I subscribe to things that break up my day. Here’s some of my favorites if you haven’t seen them before:
- FAILblog.org – the classic. All things wrong.
- AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com – stop right now and subscribe. When I’m feeling down I go here. Seriously. I’ve also had a photo of my sister I’ve been threatening to post there.
- UgliestTattoos.com (warning some NSFW) – I’m am seriously amazed what people put on their bodies. I’ve got tattoos…but I’m mean…for real?
- Photoshop Disasters – no graphic advertising intern can sneak crap past these guys.
- There I Fixed It – amazing how resourceful people are ;-)
Just a little bit of syndicated humor does wonders.
A few of us in the Silverlight team have been talking about various things and speculating on how we think the universe works. We’ve been wondering how people best learn at different levels and how they come to decisions on what tools of their trade to use, etc. I had a novel idea – let’s ask them. I’m curious if you might help us stop speculating and get a broad picture of these ideas. If you would, that would be great and help us understand better where we need to fight for prioritization of certain resources. Please forward this along to colleagues and not just your super-smartest friends…we all are at different levels and getting only one perspective doesn’t give a broad picture.
Decision resources
Obviously when you go about to start a project you have to decide on what you are going to use and why. If you are looking at Silverlight, what factors into your decision?
Why did your company choose to adopt Silverlight (or choose not to)? Was there another technology that was chosen to be better? Why/why not?
What is the most important thing in deciding if Silverlight is right? Feature set? Existing technologies? Rapid development? Other reasons?
Learning resources
On learning – how do you best learn? Do you prefer “atomic” samples? These are the ones that you can just pop in and figure out a task-based situation (i.e. how do I open a file in Silverlight). Or do you prefer more of a “lesson plan” approach to things? This would be a series based on a task (i.e. Build a Media Player in Silverlight).
On medium – in either types of these learning paths, what is your preference? Video? Written step-by-step guides? Labs?
On topics – what are the top 3 topics you expect when learning a new technology? How do you on-ramp yourself when you know nothing about it? Do you expect to learn the tools first? Or jump right in to data access?
Feel free to leave comments here on this post. I think actually asking the people who we ask to learn things will give us a better idea how to best prepare for those who haven’t learned yet…and perhaps still yourself!
Just doing some getting caught up from my holiday recently and I was reminded of a “line of business” application that was completed in Silverlight for the United States Army. It is a bit of a supply chain management application…where the supply is soldiers!