This is the seventh in a series.
As of Part 5, we had a functional end to end solution (let's call it version 1.0) that I deployed across my enterprise household. So, what's next? As with any product, we know things don't stop here -- the clients have additional expectations for functionality, the developers find new technology that would be cool to use, and the QA team finds bugs. Now that it is deployed, however, I'll have to pay special attention to version handling within our data and operation contracts.
Before making many changes, I decided it might be nice to have some unit tests to make sure I didn't break anything when rolling out new versions. A few tests later and I was glad I did. It turns out, I didn't write perfect code during my initial creation (shocking, I know). There were a few off by one errors, some stupid copy and paste errors, and a couple of functions that were just plain wrong. So, even though I didn't do test driven design, per say, I did gain the benefits of a module with reasonable unit test coverage.
So far, the biggest complaint observation from the user base has been that the client application sucks. While it's functional, it certainly isn't pretty. Additionally, it isn't the most robust implementation. For example, if you close the server application and start it back up, the client never reconnects. This is because, once a WCF service proxy faults, it stays faulted until you do something about it. So, the next phase will be to write a more robust, prettier version of the desktop client. Let's start with pretty.
The first step in creating a prettier application is, as is standard in our industry, to poach someone else's look and feel. While I certainly make my living within the Microsoft camp, the innovative UI solutions fall solidly within the Macintosh camp. So, let's take a look at Front Row. There's a great WPF implementation based on some of the Front Row functionality in a "tutorial" called /backRow. It's been a while since the author updated the article, and the Macintosh camp could do nothing but complain about the features that were missing. But, I'm no artist, so I figure I'll start with the look and feel as presented in his article but with a slightly different animation implementation. More on that later.
Source for this article will be available as it becomes ready. The next few segments will cover some of the challenges I ran into while developing the newer, prettier UI. In the mean time, here are a couple of screen shots:
