Hello Houston … we have a new user group in town. After some delay due to an unwelcome visitor whose name begins with “I”, the Houston Developer 2 Designer (D2) SIG is holding its inaugural meeting this Thursday. Regular meetings will be on the first Tuesday of the month, but this first one was moved to Thursday so that it didn’t prevent anyone from voting (which you are doing, right???).

Inaugural Houston-Area D2 SIG Meeting for Silverlight & WPF Designers and Developers Announced (Free)
When: First Tuesday of Each Month 6:00 – 8:00 PM (First meeting is Thursday, November 6, due to Election Day)
Where: Microsoft-Houston Offices (2000 West Sam Houston Parkway)
This special interest group (SIG) is a community effort open to all interested participants. Each month, a different presenter from various organizations will present to interested attendees. The group is dedicated to exploring modern user experiences (UX) which are part computer programming and part artistic design. While traditionally there has been little overlap in the two disciplines, users now expect a good experience with a professional look. Covered topics will range from development in Silverlight, WPF and related technologies such as Microsoft Surface to design of rich interactive experience for graphical designers. The group strives to provide a good balance of content that appeals to both developers and designers.
The inaugural meeting, to be held on Nov. 6th, 2008 introduces the SIG and the covered topics and technologies in general, before proceeding into this month’s presentation delivered by industry renowned expert, author, speaker, MVP, President of EPS Software Corp., and Publisher of CoDe Magazine, Markus Egger. Markus’ presentation will include the following topics:

• Introduction to Silverlight ans WPF (Windows)
• Creating a Silverlight Application
• Silverlight and WPF news from PDC!
• A first look at Microsoft Surface

RSVP Requested
Attendance of the SIG meetings is free. To allow us to plan the meetings better and to judge interest ahead of time, we ask people to RSVP here. (Signup through VPF Conversion is temporary and will be replaced in the future with www.d2sig.org.)

I know, I know, it’s a little late. I said Nov 1st and it’s now Nov 3rd. Here’s what happened – I was all on track to have it ready for the 1st, but then I got sick. I felt like a bowl of cold oatmeal, which is not very good. Kids … I’m tellin’ ya … they’re germ factories. I wound up spending the weekend in bed, resting. I could have down a drop on Friday or Saturday regardless, but it wasn’t at the point that I wanted it to be. Now that I’m feeling better, I got back down to it and got it to the point that I wanted in about an hour or so worth of work (told you I was close).

[EDIT] You can download it from CodePlex. (thanks Alan!)

Release Notes

This is a Tech Preview. Read: nowhere near final. It’s not even up to what I’d call a beta. I’m putting this up primarily for feedback from the community and (hopefully) to generate some additional interest. It does show the direction that I’m going with this and I hope you’ll notice that, while the underlying functionality is pretty complex, it’s easy to work with and easy to change the UI. I have avoided duplicated any code as much as possible, though I may have missed something.

User Interface elements:

Most of the user interface is encapsulated in User Controls, which you will find in the Controls folder. I think that the names should be self-explanatory. For simplicity, data binding is used whenever feasible. Yes, it is not the most attractive. If there is anyone with better design skills, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Implemented functionality:

It’s the very base functionality; you have catalog display and navigation, cart functionality and checkout functionality. Checkout does not, at this time, call any of the payment processing components but the code will be (for the most part) the same when that does get added in.

Installation:

Unzip the file to a folder on your system. In the Data folder, you will find a backup of the Sql Server database that is used for the site. If you restore this to “.\SqlExpress” in a database named “CommerceDb”, you will not need to make any changes at all to the connection strings. If, however, your database is different, change the connection strings that are in the web.config.

Coming next:

Added actual payment processing. Would like to get login implemented as well; we’ll see about that.