Death of Experiments with smart client factory and a new beginning with Eclipse

I have been away for a while from the blogosphere and looking back, i believe it's been damn good. As luck would have it, the upcoming project was stalled due to budgetary constraints. So I long stopped working ( or rather playing) with SmartClient factory although I am still game for it. I was assigned to a different project that was enhancement+maintenance kind of work that consumed my 4 hrs of unofficial time as well ( above the 10-12 official hrs i clock btw).

If you have read my previous posts, you would know we started with SCRUM - an agile project management approach. Obviously, i was also inclined towards other agile practices and I have recently tried my hands on lean management as well. One agile practice that stands out for me is and I must say I am addicted to it, so much so that I do not even feel like writing simple test applications without having tests first. Apart from several books, I think the best resource has been the TestDrivenDevelopment _at_ Y!groups.com. I will make an attempt to write about TDD on a topic that has not been covered by experts in future.

Since the project I was assigned did not even follow any unit testing methodology ( several architects in the past have tried and failed miserably ;-) ) and I was soon becoming a TDD freak, thought it would be a nice challenge to take up. I did not want my principles to shake and did succeed in implementing a complete enhancement using TDD ( though I was the lone TDDer.. i hope to change that soon).

The past tense was intentional. Recently, all of a sudden, I have been hot swapped into another so called critical & deeply red project. This new project is based on Eclipse and makes use of EMF, GEF and GMF. Whats interesting is Smart client factory is supposed to be the exact look alike of Eclipse or that has been my learning so far from my experiments and readings. So there is the link between my last post and this post, and the sole motivation to bring my identity back to life.

I will write more frequently.. lots of topics to cover.. so once again keep watching this space for some "common sense material" as common sense is not common at all! ( yes that's been one of my learnings in the past 9 months)..

Happy reading..

Playing with Smart Client Software Factory - The start

A couple of months ago, I happended to attend a presentation on a Software Product developed using Microsoft.NET Framework and I was pretty impressed with its features and the user interface. Since the Lead Architect himself was presenting the capabilities, I curiously asked how long did it take for you to come this far in terms of features that he presented. And he said we have been working on this for around 8 months now and we have a 6 people development team. I knew that the team had other tasks as well and I was pretty amazed. Then he said - "Its based on Smart Client Framework from Microsoft" in a way that sounded like - What! you dont know about Smart Client ?

Since then, i have been interested to know what MS is providing that makes Windows Forms Application development simple. So for the last couple of days I have been trying to understand what this is all about. My first stop was google and I would advise reading David Hill's blog to know more about Smart Client.

My attempts to download took me to the patterns and practices home page in MSDN and from there i jumped to CodePlex ( MS Open Source Project Repository). I downloaded everything that is available on SmartClient and when I ran the Setup, i saw a "Check Dependencies" button to the right and could immediately see that there were some items missing on my PC. Oh, btw, I have Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition with Service Pack 1 installed on my Dell Latitude D620 Laptop. And I also have .NET 3.0 and the Visual Studio Extensions for .NET 3.0 In installed. Coming back, the items missing were -

Guidance Automation Extensions
Guidance Automation ToolKit
SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition

You could complete the installation and comeback to have Guidance Automation support. However I decided to install them before I go ahead. So I quit the installation and downloaded all of the above. I also noticed that there is an Enterprise Library 3.1 released in May 2007. uh! There is also a Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework SP1, but since the installation failed, I gave up. Anyway it was not a dependency. I installed the items in the order as listed above and then finally i installed the Smart Client Software Factory.

I m all set for exploring Smart Client Software Factory. I launched Visual Studio and verified that I can create a solution that is using the Smart Client Software Factory and it works!

Keep looking at this space for updates on my experiments with Smart Client Software Factory.

Thanks for Reading.