People Progress, Switch to Reading Files

This is not really a blog post that will be helpful to others as I try to do with most. Instead, I’m making notes of my progress on a refresh of the Zachrys Heritage website.

People Drawings – Some Progress

As I mentioned, I am trying to do both a Silverlight (primary) and a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) (secondary) version of the Family.Show using an MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) approach.

Here is what I have for Silverlight…

And for WPF…

So I’ve made some progress. I am quite disappointed at how little code I’ve been able to share between the two versions so far. I will continue to refactor as I work with these. The primary reason the there isn’t much code reuse yet is the hover or mouse over feature. That is very different than what was used in Family.Show.

Need to Read

Now I need to switch to reading the files. In order to take the next step I need to implement the “Group” functionality and I think that reading a file will be the easiest way to do that. So for a while I’ll switch gears to writing unit tests for that and implementing the code. The fast part will be the actual reading, but the slow part for me will be getting the information into the Silverlight application. That means I’ll need to pickup and learn more about WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) – since that’s the only way to get data into a SIlverlight application.

In the end I’ll have all the information in a Microsoft SQL Server database. But for now I’m starting with a file. I’ll strive to minimize rework that will be needed for the Silverlight application as I make that transition.