Programming

Visual Studio Spell Checker – Dot Your I’s And Cross Your T’s

Visual Studio Spell CheckerVisual Studio Spell Checker – A couple of years ago, I had to create an application  for a German company. Along with using localisation to create the German/English translation, spell checking that sucker was a challenge.

There were well over a few hundred text strings and many of these were stored in code. Nevertheless, we made it through after a long and tedious development. Suffice to say that developers aren’t the best of spell checkers.

Well now there is help on the horizon. Visual Studio Spell Checker is a free add-in available on the Visual Studio Gallery and supports Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010. (more…)

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Existing Data And Visual Studio LightSwitch

lightswitch existing dataExisting Data – LightSwitch has shown us this week how easy it is to create a fully data aware application in a very short amount of time and with minimal developer effort. But what about adding existing data?

I received a message from a reader in Johannesburg this week. His company used an Access database for one of their applications, but needed to migrate away from Access (probably because the data grew large enough to warrant the use of SQL). They had already created the SQL database and migrated the data, and now needed to quickly create a user interface.

His question to me was what technology he could use to create a GUI in the shortest amount of time, without having to learn how to program. Obviously I suggested LightSwitch. (more…)

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LightSwitch Themes – A Change Is As Good As A Holiday

lightswitch themesLightSwitch Themes – One of the most pivotal moments for me during my LightSwitch adventures were themes. If you have been following the previous articles, you will know that LightSwitch brings exceptional ease of use to your development repertoire.

One of the most confining areas of an application is the look and feel. Once you have created an app, it becomes extremely difficult to change the look and feel without being an extremely painful experience. With LightSwitch Themes, this is no longer a problem. The process to follow to change a LightSwitch Theme isn’t immediately obvious. But this doesn’t make the process any more difficult to perform.

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LightSwitch Data – Fleshing Out Your Application

lightswitch data logoLightSwitch Data – If you have followed the previous two articles I wrote (Visual Studio LightSwitch – True Power Lies In Simplicity and Extending LightSwitch – Deeper Down The Rabbit Hole), you will by now know that our little application is becoming more sophisticated and feature rich.

I have to hasten to add, our application is becoming more feature rich without us having to do much work. It seems almost like stealing candy from a baby, and I almost feel guilty for getting so much satisfaction from creating with LightSwitch.

If by now you aren’t hooked on LightSwitch, I don’t know what will get you hooked. The more I play with LightSwitch, the more I love it. It is easy to see why there is such a large community behind this technology.

As I have mentioned before, it is the data that drives LightSwitch. The underlying data layer needs to be correct, so a basic understanding of databases is preferable. But the technology is also very forgiving. Give it a few hours time, and you will be quite fluent with it. (more…)

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Extending LightSwitch – Deeper Down The Rabbit Hole

Extending LightSwitch Application With DataExtending LightSwitch – In my previous post Visual Studio LightSwitch – True Power Lies In Simplicity, I showed how easy and quick it was to create a fully functional, data aware Windows Form. If you haven’t read the previous post, go check it out.

In this post however, I want to take it one step further. They say that no man is an island. Well, I can tell you with confidence that no app is an island either.

Using our previous application as a foundation, let us assume that we wanted to group members together according to some sort of classification. How easy would that be? Let us create another table to group members by their level of study within the organisation. (more…)

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Visual Studio LightSwitch – True Power Lies In Simplicity

visual studio lightswitchVisual Studio LightSwitch – If I had to ask you to write an application that just needs to record basic member details (Name, Last Name, Telephone, Address and Image), how long do you think that will take you to do? Can you give me a ball park figure on the time it will take? What about 30 minutes?

Well Visual Studio LightSwitch is one of the most incredible technologies available to developers. If you need to create highly customizable data driven forms, Visual Studio LightSwitch is the way to go.

The Visual Studio LightSwitch community is a large one, and is made up of some really awesome people too numerous to mention. But there are a few that I do want to introduce you too. Here are your wingmen and women. Be sure to bookmark their blogs, add them to your RSS feed and follow them on social media. (more…)

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Essential Studio For Windows Forms By Syncfusion

Essential Studio For Windows FormsEssential Studio – As a Software Developer, it is really difficult to make your application stand out from the rest. It needs a definite edge or left hook as it were to differentiate it.

It is especially hard if you are writing your own salary at the end of the day. Your applications need to be as flawless as possible while maintaining a level of user friendliness that can easily be experienced by users of all skill levels.

Now I know that there are many of you that are developing for the newer technologies such as Windows 8, or perhaps a mobile platform. But I know for a fact that there are many developers that need to get the job done in the shortest amount of time using the simplest methods available. The answer for many developers is Windows Forms. (more…)

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Subversion And Conflicted SUO Files

Conflicted suo file SVN

Conflicted suo files are the bane of every developer’s existence. I have been using SVN as my code repository for years now. I must admit that I probably don’t know it as well as I should. Unfortunately I know it as well as I need to, which is a totally different thing. You see, developers are generally lazy. Why re-do work if you can do it once and re-use.

The same can be said of what we know about the tools we use. Once we are comfortable with what we know and can work with, we somehow fail to learn more. Call it knowing just enough to be functional, call it lazy, call it what you want. Somehow, I feel that we should learn more. (more…)

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PowerMockup – A Tool Every Developer Must Have

PowerMockup Featured Imagefor Blog Post

A little while ago, I wrote a post called Visual Studio 2012 Tips Part 1 – PowerPoint Storyboarding in which I discussed creating StoryBoards with the PowerPoint add-in that comes with Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate.

It helps you design your application’s interface and allows rudimentary interactivity through the use of hyperlinks between the slides. Well this is all good and well, but what if you don’t have Visual Studio? What if you’re not a .NET Developer?

Enter PowerMockup. I have been using it for a few days now, and I have to say that I am incredibly surprised at how easy it is to create interactive UI designs. In no time at all, I was able to create stunning interfaces and made me realise what an indispensable tool this actually is for a developer. (more…)

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