Recently our team has been engaged in developing a highly scalable batch processing system, which to be fair didn’t require much beyond a fairly simple User Interface with few screens. Given our choice of WPF as the technology to build the presentation layer, we decided to extend our curiosity in SketchFlow and put it to the test in a real live project.
So, off we set and created our prototype and when completed, sent it on to the stakeholders to cast their critical
eye upon it and provide feedback using the SketchFlow players tools for capturing feedback. I must admit that I wasn’t convinced that our users / stakeholders where going to be particularly enamoured by the experience but I am happy to say that I was wrong- so incredibly wrong. Whilst developing the prototype I found myself continually applying my own biases toward the tool and they were such that I was developing an opinion that SketchFlow’s feedback mechanism was a little too simple and perhaps even ‘clunky’ to provide them with an experience that they would consider productive or enjoyable. However, the feedback came through very swiftly and along with it an enormous endorsement of the process, tool and the whole experience.
These user / stakeholders are used to defining and or changing a proposed UI layout in well known visual design applications (unnamed) and feeding those design documents accompanied with text documents (for annotation) to the software team for consideration. These documents would bounce between parties until a finalised design had been settled upon.
This time, upon having been supplied feedback via SketchFlow, they are reporting a significant amount of saving in time dedicated to the process and they are attributing that time saving entirely to the ease of use and functionality of SketchFlow. Now it’s early days yet and I don’t want to get carried away until we get a few more iterations into the process, however I am feeling pretty excited when our users come back with such positive feedback in their experience of the whole development life cycle.
And there I was, ready to put the kybosh on the idea. I cant argue a case when the business stakeholders show you nothing but thumbs pointing in an upward direction.
One of the clear value added possibilities with IronRuby and IronPython (or any DLR language) has to offer is making applications scriptable. This opens the possibility for enabling scripting of your application, it’s types and potentially objects running in memory in your application at runtime. I recently went looking for an IronRuby console / shell window control written natively in WPF and turned up nothing. I did however come across some examples implemented for Windows Forms and the one that got my attention was Orion Edwards Embedded IronRuby Interactive Console.
Whilst Orion’s project provided the basis of what I was after, I was under no illusion that I would find exactly what I was after and would therefore have to build out the rest of the functionality I required.
The Basic Requirements List
- Reusable WPF User Control
- The Console should allow users to write script against in memory objects of the host application.
- Should persist (to a log) the state of variables in the IronRuby runtime scopes.
- Extensible Application Design and easily maintained and Testable.
So rather than re-invent the wheel I started out with Orion’s code and worked it into a WPF User Control that followed the MVP pattern. This version supports printing of all scope variable state to the console window, clearing of the console window text and all the out of the box access to the IronRuby runtime from the console itself. The IronRuby Console User control also allows the consumer application to pass through in memory variables from your managed CLR hosting application.
Finally I need to also make mention that some of the classes used to stream the STD/IO came directly from Ben Halls wonderful IronEditor. And before I forget, the code can found here on my blogs subversion repository.
Personally I have a pretty rapid fire kind of scanning action that allows me to try to find information that matches my requirement quickly. Sometimes I need to slow down when the topic is too deep, for example Databinding in WPF. The examples out on the web for Databinding WPF are not that great yet (IMO) and too many only touch the simplest kind of Databinding scenarios, focussing largely on how the data is structured and from a Models point of view (no pun intended). Models can get pretty deep and nested, yet for the most part the binding examples focus on the really trivial data scenarios where the depth is not considerable and furthermore often binding to static resources rather than data that came from the Database courtesy of an ORM or perhaps Astoria or even plain old ADO.NET. So enough complaining cause that wont change anything and like Roy said ‘what are you going to do about it’ ; time to get on with putting some examples together myself! Of course they will end up here when they are done.
eye upon it and provide feedback using the SketchFlow players tools for capturing feedback. I must admit that I wasn’t convinced that our users / stakeholders where going to be particularly enamoured by the experience but I am happy to say that I was wrong- so incredibly wrong. Whilst developing the prototype I found myself continually applying my own biases toward the tool and they were such that I was developing an opinion that SketchFlow’s feedback mechanism was a little too simple and perhaps even ‘clunky’ to provide them with an experience that they would consider productive or enjoyable. However, the feedback came through very swiftly and along with it an enormous endorsement of the process, tool and the whole experience.
This time, upon having been supplied feedback via SketchFlow, they are reporting a significant amount of saving in time dedicated to the process and they are attributing that time saving entirely to the ease of use and functionality of SketchFlow. Now it’s early days yet and I don’t want to get carried away until we get a few more iterations into the process, however I am feeling pretty excited when our users come back with such positive feedback in their experience of the whole development life cycle.
