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Showing posts from April, 2010

Developer Viewpoint: Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow

You can see my own direct review of SketchFlow here . This article is a great introduction to SketchFlow, which is found in Microsoft's Expression Blend. Rapid Prototyping with SketchFlow Unlike developer "design" tools, SketchFlow is really great at focusing on the interface and how users will interact with the application. I'm not a graphics designer so I know pretty much right off the bat, my prototype may not have the prettiest graphics designs. However, with Expression Blend, I was able to make the UI look half-decent. It uses XAML files to show case the interface - this is extremely useful as I just grabbed some earlier work being done in Visual Studio and dropped it in - worked like a charm. I was then able to make changes to the XAML from a designer's perspective instead of a developer's. With the SketchFlow Map, you simply draw lines to create a flow between "pages" of your application or to integrate shared components. When you build your a

VFP Stack Overflow: What's In A Name?

In the latest issue of FoxRockX, Ken Levy has an interesting op-ed piece called the Visual FoxPro Stack Overflow . I'm not sure if the latest issue is a re-hash of the original which was posted last summer. It's a little like the similar page on the VFP Stack, nothing all of the possible VFP projects, including VFPX, VFP Studio, etc, etc. What would you call it? The community decided a few years back that VFPX was a better term than VFP.Next. Is that still the best term? Perhaps more interestingly in the piece, Ken noted that the FoxPro trademark was dropped by Microsoft years ago. As a result, FoxPro and VFP can be found through search engines without anything having to do with the VFP Development tool. This is where the whole concept of stack comes up. If you consider that LAMP is (Linux,Apache,MySQL,PHP), what would a better term for VFP be? The bigger issue here for me is that how do developers "get" Visual FoxPro, without MSDN, moving forward. If you consider the