Oh blog. How I love to neglect you.
Well, I hadn't done much personal development in a while.
Had a few reasons for that. I switched to Windows 8 Developer Preview as my main OS with plans of writing some WinRT apps only to discover some things that should have been obvious long before heading down that path. Long story short, that put a bit of a halt in things. That said, I have had VS 2010 Express and VS 11 on here for a while and have been dabbling here and there, but nothing blog worthy.
But, as luck would have it, something interesting has popped back up. Starting to get a bit excited for my side development projects. As I mentioned last time, I finally got around that headache that was coding with SQLite in .Net 4.0 by finding a C# port of the project that I can just compile easily every time. I'm too lazy to double check if I covered this in substantial depth, but I also, FINALLY, wrote a nice re-usable library for creating and managing multiple DB connections easily using Fluent nHibernate. If I forgot that one, I may come back and add another article on that. It was an interesting project.
That set the pace for me to one day come back to my side projects, but there was still one piece missing. Reporting. I had a usable solution which I had worked with called CodeReasons. It was a thorn in my side though, because it looked like WPF/Silverlight XAML, but didn't have the data binding and all of the flexibility. All it succeeded in doing was making me REALLY want to be able to just generate a control in XAML and send it wherever I wanted. So, I made that my task of the night. I was going to revisit what I did for Tony (which functionally did what I needed but lacked pagination), but thought to try my google-fu out again. This time I found a solution that worked out of the box... just needed some massaging to work exactly the way I wanted it to. So now I have that too.
And that is really the extent of the exciting news. The reporting control isn't even conceptually all that fun. But Veronica has started becoming vocal again about wanting new features in the application and all of these mini-hurdles have been holding me back from starting on a new version which I had wanted to do much more than improve the old code (WinForms vs. WPF = no contest). Now that all of the hurdles I can think of are gone, I think should be able to start on it again.
In other news, I went looking for either a free accounting package with a good integration API, or an open source C# accounting application. Needless to say I found neither. I think if I ever get good and truly bored, that will be my next major project. I can't believe how difficult it is to find something so pervasive as an accounting engine that is both free and easy to integrate with. That one came up because Veronica was talking with one of the business owners she works with who currently does everything on paper. But while simple software to manage the store is great, more people want at least some level of accounting data.
Had a few reasons for that. I switched to Windows 8 Developer Preview as my main OS with plans of writing some WinRT apps only to discover some things that should have been obvious long before heading down that path. Long story short, that put a bit of a halt in things. That said, I have had VS 2010 Express and VS 11 on here for a while and have been dabbling here and there, but nothing blog worthy.
But, as luck would have it, something interesting has popped back up. Starting to get a bit excited for my side development projects. As I mentioned last time, I finally got around that headache that was coding with SQLite in .Net 4.0 by finding a C# port of the project that I can just compile easily every time. I'm too lazy to double check if I covered this in substantial depth, but I also, FINALLY, wrote a nice re-usable library for creating and managing multiple DB connections easily using Fluent nHibernate. If I forgot that one, I may come back and add another article on that. It was an interesting project.
That set the pace for me to one day come back to my side projects, but there was still one piece missing. Reporting. I had a usable solution which I had worked with called CodeReasons. It was a thorn in my side though, because it looked like WPF/Silverlight XAML, but didn't have the data binding and all of the flexibility. All it succeeded in doing was making me REALLY want to be able to just generate a control in XAML and send it wherever I wanted. So, I made that my task of the night. I was going to revisit what I did for Tony (which functionally did what I needed but lacked pagination), but thought to try my google-fu out again. This time I found a solution that worked out of the box... just needed some massaging to work exactly the way I wanted it to. So now I have that too.
And that is really the extent of the exciting news. The reporting control isn't even conceptually all that fun. But Veronica has started becoming vocal again about wanting new features in the application and all of these mini-hurdles have been holding me back from starting on a new version which I had wanted to do much more than improve the old code (WinForms vs. WPF = no contest). Now that all of the hurdles I can think of are gone, I think should be able to start on it again.
In other news, I went looking for either a free accounting package with a good integration API, or an open source C# accounting application. Needless to say I found neither. I think if I ever get good and truly bored, that will be my next major project. I can't believe how difficult it is to find something so pervasive as an accounting engine that is both free and easy to integrate with. That one came up because Veronica was talking with one of the business owners she works with who currently does everything on paper. But while simple software to manage the store is great, more people want at least some level of accounting data.
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