Engineering Mountains...

of Dew.

Marvel at my ingenuity..

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.8

The Xaml Workshop: Building a Dynamic, Efficient Data Auditing Model

What do you do when you're software is being blamed for the "incorrect" numbers being shown in reports? Learn to implement an Efficient Data Auditing Model so you can stick it to the man! Great writeup from our friend at XamlWorkshop

Error Code: ID10t

The Xaml Workshop: Building a Dynamic, Efficient Data Auditing Model: "Welcome to the wonderful world of data audits. As anyone who has ever dealt with annoying managers and clueless users knows, the word 'data..."

The Xaml Workshop: Converting Delimited Data Into a Table

Learn to dynamically insert comma-delimited data into a T-SQL from our friends at XamlWorkshop

The Xaml Workshop: Converting Delimited Data Into a Table: "To setup the scenario for this example, you can probably think of several instances when you pass a comma or semi-colon delimited list of values into a Stored Procedure, and need to parse each value separately. This function will do just that, but in a re-usable, dynamic way...."

The Xaml Workshop: How-To : Data Binding & Behaviors

Image via CrunchBase

Here's a good write-up of using Data Binding Behaviors from our friend over at XamlWorkshop

The Xaml Workshop: How-To : Data Binding & Behaviors: "
For this example, we will utilize the power of Data Binding and the InvokeCommandAction behavior in a UserControl.

Let's imagine this scenario: we are creating a web application, and need to perform the same task when multiple controls receive the Click event. In my real-life solution, I am building a shell using Silverlight 4 and MEF...." 

No Words To Describe...

At times, i wonder how the rest of our company manages to function. It's not that i don't believe they can use their brain to figure out simple issues, but i don't think THEY believe they can use their brain.

My coworker, codename "Jose", received an email from a manager from our Customer Service department yesterday after he was gone for the day. Recently a report was added to her report generation program that shows orders from the Internet. When she got around to running it for her first time, she noticed that the dates on the orders didn't go past 6/13/2010. She panicked.

SOUND THE ALARMS!

She sent an email off explaining (really exaggerating the situation) and giving all kinds of doomsday scenarios about how Orders from the website didn't work, and she CC'd some of the higher-ups from her Branch on this email. In between the initial sending of the email, and the time Jose got around to checking on it and responding, there had been several emails back and forth between everyone but Jose, as he not yet read it.

"How could this happen? What are we going to do?"

..they wanted to know. Now, the manager had attached the report to the email..but nobody had bothered to look at it.

Jose gets into work, in denial about there being any issue with Internet Orders going through (especially since he and i had tested them a handful of times both internally and externally). He opens up the attached report, and sees the orders she saw. He then scrolls down and sees the rest of the orders that were supposedly missing.

The report was ordered by Order Total, rather than date, and just coincidentally had no dates after 6/13/2010 on the first page because of the ordering selected.

REALLY GUYS? REALLY?

This video is actually about my company. We were on a Reality TV show and this was footage taken from that (Ignore the Bugs Life Title....Disney ripped it off of us! No really..). Watch the whole thing so you understand what we have to deal with on a day to day basis.



Special Thanks to my other coworker, codename "TurtleHawk", for digging up this shocking footage!

Reach For The Skyyyy...

Wanted to share a little tool with you that i found while making mock-ups for the new Team of Programmers layout.

You're mocking me, aren't you?

Oh no, no no no, no. - Buzz look, an alien!

Mocking Bird is a nice online tool that allows you to create quick & easy wireframe of your website or application!

Not only was it easy, but i can easily share my mockup!



This tool has saved me a lot of trees, so i thought it only justified i give it a bump ;)

Shortcomings of the WPFToolkit DatePicker - Part 1

Anytime i develop and application using WPF, i can't help but wish i was doing it in Silverlight instead. The Silverlight Toolkit has been given way more love than the WPF Toolkit in terms of coming out with new and sexy looking controls. Despite the transparent differences in toolkits, they both had a DatePicker that left me wanting more.

The application i had wanted to use this DatePicker for needed to have all input controls optimized for speedy entry. Our employees however have come from using different kinds of programs developed by different programmers. Some developers made use of masking, some made things very key friendly, some made it mouse friendly, and some...made the user hate him by doing nothing.

So with the end user coming many different ease of entry backgrounds, i needed a DatePicker that has EVERYTHING

The first thing i had hoped to find, was textbox masking on the entry of the date so that it would hold the proper __/__/____ format and not allow excessive numbers to extend the text. Although errors were handled when the DatePicker was treated like this, it still allowed extra entries, and even letters to be entered into the DatePicker. The Calendar/DatePicker control from Telerik in their RadControls had the same drawbacks. I also didn't find what i was looking for in the DateTimePicker in the AvalonControlLibrary.

The second thing i was hoping to find, was smart increments and decrements made by the Up and Down arrow keys. The last thing, related to my last wish, are small "Arrow" buttons near the calendar button to allow for quick date increments for each of the 3 sections just by a mouseclick if you happened to select the wrong year or something. None of the above mentioned developers/groups had these feature either.

So now what?

Since i couldn't benefit from someone else's work, i decided that i would allow others to benefit from mine! Stay tuned for Part 2!


Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for your disgust for my lack of knowledge with Best Coding Practices