Balsamiq: Another mockup building tool for all kind of purpose.

Today I am going to share yet another mockup building tool with you guys. Before going in to more discussion, can you recall any good mockup tool free, i.e. either freeware or shareware three year back. We used Microsoft Visio for a long time. Until our designers made up there mind to do all sort of mockup using Photoshop. Again considering the price of the tool Photoshop was a good choice as it serve multiple purpose for the designers.

The tool or component that I want to share with you guys is Balsamiq. It is yet another mockup building tool and I must say a very good one. I have already talking about mockupbuilder.com where a silverlight component do all the thing for mockup. Here we can say that it’s a competitor for the mocupbuilder.com, Balsamiq is designed and developed via flex(Perhaps) and has runtime framework as adobe Air.

Its free if you use this by lunching from there site, and you can also buy the commercial version with $79 for a single license. Till now our designers are using this free version and They are pretty happy about it.

On thing I must mention here that not only designers are comfortable with it, stake holders like developers and product owners even customers understand the simple sketch like drawing. As our project manager said

“Even though the name sounds funny but the tool is awesome and we are liking it”

Until next time me signing our.

Between Extension method for double

This is a work in progress and can be used for only numeric data types. And also works with all the object that implements IComparable.

Works for almost every case and it is pretty handily.

/// <summary>
    /// Extention method for between
    /// </summary>
    public static class SomeExtention
    {
        public static bool Between<T>(this T actual, T lower, T upper) where T : IComparable<T>
        {
            return actual.CompareTo(lower) >= 0 && actual.CompareTo(upper) <= 0;
        }
    }

Looking forward to share more about this stuff. Until next time bye bye.

Trello an excellent example of awesome scrum/Kanban digital board

 

Today I want to share a really interesting tool with the community. Its simple, its easy, its really user friendly its Trello. From the makers of FogBugz yet another awesome tool to ease the developers life. It’s a free tool, at least till now you can create and manage multiple boards. Typically a organization have multiple ongoing projects, and this tool also support multiple boards.

We can create as many columns depending on our needs. For instance. Back lock, Hotbox , In Development, Pre-QA, Under –QA, Finished, etc. We are trying to use this for our small projects till now, but it has huge potential to manage big size projects. I am looking forward to get some velocity calculation and advanced reporting features in future.

Till Next time. Its me signing out.

Mockup builder : Yet another awesome mockup building tool for your software.

In one of my last post I have discussed about an interesting web based tool to design and manage project the creately project to be precise. In this post I want to share another tool, I really find this tool useful, there is a whole lot of tools and controls set to build any kind of mockup. And I found this a perfect replacement of visio. but I must mention one point here before the continuation of the post, its Free!, its still in beta state though, hope this will be free in the release version also.

This tool is written entirely in Silverlight, and must say this is an state of art example what Silverlight can do, this project has also has out of browser experience so you can also install this in your local machine for offline browsing. you guys can checkout this tool from http://mockupbuilder.com/.

Some very interesting feature is that you can create project and design multi-screen mockups. I hope this tool will be free for use as long as it remains.

Use Creately to manage your software artifacts

This is a interesting tool, a full web based UML, and other diagrams designer tool, just like mockupbuilder. you can checkout this tool at http://creately.com/.

You would be surprised to see the client list of this tool. And some surprising integration with your existing collaboration tool.

But for uses we have a simple problem, that’s money proportional to extendibility. This tool has some basic free service but for advanced services you have to use the commercial stuff. Why we don’t have free stuff? its because the world will not give us the basic needs for free so some one have to do business to make money.

Did I mention that you can build your software mockup as well, in this tool apart from doing awesome collaboration. And not to mention it has a desktop version as well, incase you want to replace MS Visio with Creately.

“I dream of a all free software world.”

Using Linq To SQL with SQL Server Compact 3.5

In my previous post we have discussed how we can use SQL server compact 4.0 with Entity Framework, and turned out its pretty easy, and no challenge what so ever. In this section we are going to see how we can use Linq To SQL with SQL Server Compact 4.0. Lets see if we can find some challenge this time.

We are going to use same NorthWind.sdf database example what we have discussed in previous section. Normal Procedure of using Linq To SQL Data Classes is simple, you got to add a “Linq To SQL Data classes” Template in Project and then drag and drop the data tables from Data connection to the surface of design view of Linq to sql data classes. If you try to do this with SQL Server Compact 4.0 you would have a error like the following screen shot. The main concern is that you can’t add it. And then there is no point of using it.

It appeared you can’t use SQL Server Compact 4.0 with Linq To SQL anymore. So only way to use Microsoft ORM is Ado.net Entity Framework. But you can use SQL Server Compact 3.5 with Linq To SQL. So lets forget about version 4.0 for now, and try using it with 3.5 sp2. Still you have the same problem, that is no default provider. But this time we have few workarounds.

Workaround

Alright so we failed to created data classes for linq to sql normally, lets try some other way now in others words every thing have a workaround. There are couple of solutions to our problem but we are going to use one of the most easy one, a tool that will generate the dbml file for us, http://sqlmetalosui.codeplex.com/ this is a UI tool build to support sqlmetal.exe.

We will download and install this tool as an external tool in visual studio, I am not going to explain every detail how to install and add it in visual studio as external tool, and assuming you some how know it, After adding it with correct name and location you can get a tool like the bello screen shot.

Select Third option, that is “by Input File (.sdf)” So here you can just browse for the database and then select destinations file in the next step, and click and then browse for dbml, last of of all click ok to generate the file.

Since this GUI tool is just a wrapper for SqlMetal.exe you can also use it via commandline argument, and generate the dbml file.

The Command : SqlMetal /dbml:northwind.dbml northwind.sdf

Copy and pest the generated northwind.dbml file in your project, vs will generate the other two file for you. and then use right connection string when calling the functions.

Northwind northwind = new Northwind(@"Data Source=|DataDirectory|\Northwind.sdf");
List<Employees> employeeses = northwind.Employees.ToList();

On top we have put down two line of sample code for demo. That’s it. Well till next post , best of luck and happy programming.