Further successes...
So, I've been a bit psyched since my latest successes. After the help from the tutorial and some additional research, I now have a modestly functional demo application. As of right now it does the following:
- Uses the auto generated login and registration form. Functionality would need to be tweaked for a real world app, but a cool out of the box feature.
- Upon successful login, it hides a notification to login and displays a button to manage Projects.
- Pressing the button to manage the projects brings up a list of current projects from which they can be edited, added, removed or made the active Project.
- Making a project the active project closes the Project management window, adds a new Button to manage the Active Project's Phases and displays a the Project name in a newly visible stack panel at the top of the screen.
- Pressing the button to manage the Active Project's Phases brings up another window wherein new Project phases can be added, deleted, edited or set as the active Phase similar to the Project manager. Creating a new Phase associates it with the current Project.
- Setting a Phase as the Active Phase displays a new side bar to contain more buttons.
Not too shabby, have 2 screens with full read/write access to the database up and running and the application is able to make associations between my objects successfully. The second screen (the Project Phases Manager) took less than half an hour, so once you get the hang of this it can be fairly rapid on the development side.
So, I'm confident at this point that I'm now making headway, though there are still a few more things I want to do with this project before I move back into the "real thing".
- I want to create a control inside my DataGrid's to allow me to select from a drop down which Object to use in the association, currently I'm leveraging the Active objects (Project and Phase) to manage this, but doesn't allow for associations to be updated. I could figure this while I'm working on the main project, but I would rather know how to do it before getting to that point.
- Also, there is a bug where when I do a cascaded delete (home grown cascading code), the next time I add an object to that table it throw an exception when I close. Wagering it has to do with my identity columns, seems to grab the next highest number as opposed to continuing the sequence, probably a collision of some sort in the DAL, I don't think my home grown code is to blame but you never know... might need to change my keys to Guid's, or figure out why it doesn't appear that the DB is handling the identities.
- I don't have any home grown validation added yet... sooner or later I will need some, and a demo project is a good way to discover the best way to approach this.
Also,there are a few things I want to explore in the main project. I could do them in this demo app, but they are outside the scope in a manner of speaking (meaning these change may not even end up in the same group of projects as the main design executable projects). The one of note is that I need to find out why my design changes to the entities stopped cascading back to the database. I can see a few new fields in the tables from some earlier changes, but after that they became disconnected somehow, hence my original headache where everything looked like the tutorial but I hit exceptions anyway.
So, now that I feel I'm finally making it somewhere with Silverlight, I'm going to go back to guitar for a bit. I've decided to start looking for songs which can be played on one guitar to complement the songs I want to learn the lead for. Reason is a combination of poor excuses and good ones. Among the poor ones are instant gratification and ease, and among the good ones are that it still builds the muscles I needs, improves my muscle memory for chord changes and increases my range. Basically, I love playing lead guitar, it is challenging and I love the riffs, but the downside is that most songs with good lead guitar spend the time with the focus on the rhythm parts and it is hard to stay dedicated to the lead guitar work if that is all you're ever working on, unless you have a band to play with. Also, perhaps it is just me, but I can't play lead guitar AND sing most of the time. This means that I can't really play lead guitar and entertain friends or family, while I'll still pull out the occasional riff or play the lead for an entire song, eventually they want to hear something either I'm singing or that they can sing along with.
That means, next quest is to rummage through my playlist for songs with strong rhythm guitar sections. Figure I can aim for 3 songs I want to learn the lead for and 7 rhythm. This will still end up with the lead guitar songs taking longer to learn but at least I'll have a small repertoire of songs to cycle through while playing.
- Uses the auto generated login and registration form. Functionality would need to be tweaked for a real world app, but a cool out of the box feature.
- Upon successful login, it hides a notification to login and displays a button to manage Projects.
- Pressing the button to manage the projects brings up a list of current projects from which they can be edited, added, removed or made the active Project.
- Making a project the active project closes the Project management window, adds a new Button to manage the Active Project's Phases and displays a the Project name in a newly visible stack panel at the top of the screen.
- Pressing the button to manage the Active Project's Phases brings up another window wherein new Project phases can be added, deleted, edited or set as the active Phase similar to the Project manager. Creating a new Phase associates it with the current Project.
- Setting a Phase as the Active Phase displays a new side bar to contain more buttons.
Not too shabby, have 2 screens with full read/write access to the database up and running and the application is able to make associations between my objects successfully. The second screen (the Project Phases Manager) took less than half an hour, so once you get the hang of this it can be fairly rapid on the development side.
So, I'm confident at this point that I'm now making headway, though there are still a few more things I want to do with this project before I move back into the "real thing".
- I want to create a control inside my DataGrid's to allow me to select from a drop down which Object to use in the association, currently I'm leveraging the Active objects (Project and Phase) to manage this, but doesn't allow for associations to be updated. I could figure this while I'm working on the main project, but I would rather know how to do it before getting to that point.
- Also, there is a bug where when I do a cascaded delete (home grown cascading code), the next time I add an object to that table it throw an exception when I close. Wagering it has to do with my identity columns, seems to grab the next highest number as opposed to continuing the sequence, probably a collision of some sort in the DAL, I don't think my home grown code is to blame but you never know... might need to change my keys to Guid's, or figure out why it doesn't appear that the DB is handling the identities.
- I don't have any home grown validation added yet... sooner or later I will need some, and a demo project is a good way to discover the best way to approach this.
Also,there are a few things I want to explore in the main project. I could do them in this demo app, but they are outside the scope in a manner of speaking (meaning these change may not even end up in the same group of projects as the main design executable projects). The one of note is that I need to find out why my design changes to the entities stopped cascading back to the database. I can see a few new fields in the tables from some earlier changes, but after that they became disconnected somehow, hence my original headache where everything looked like the tutorial but I hit exceptions anyway.
So, now that I feel I'm finally making it somewhere with Silverlight, I'm going to go back to guitar for a bit. I've decided to start looking for songs which can be played on one guitar to complement the songs I want to learn the lead for. Reason is a combination of poor excuses and good ones. Among the poor ones are instant gratification and ease, and among the good ones are that it still builds the muscles I needs, improves my muscle memory for chord changes and increases my range. Basically, I love playing lead guitar, it is challenging and I love the riffs, but the downside is that most songs with good lead guitar spend the time with the focus on the rhythm parts and it is hard to stay dedicated to the lead guitar work if that is all you're ever working on, unless you have a band to play with. Also, perhaps it is just me, but I can't play lead guitar AND sing most of the time. This means that I can't really play lead guitar and entertain friends or family, while I'll still pull out the occasional riff or play the lead for an entire song, eventually they want to hear something either I'm singing or that they can sing along with.
That means, next quest is to rummage through my playlist for songs with strong rhythm guitar sections. Figure I can aim for 3 songs I want to learn the lead for and 7 rhythm. This will still end up with the lead guitar songs taking longer to learn but at least I'll have a small repertoire of songs to cycle through while playing.
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