A couple weeks ago I was able to present a small demo of Vidyano to Katrien De Graeve, developer evangelist at Microsoft Belgium & Luxemburg. I showed some of the capabilities as well as some finished applications which were build with the help of Vidyano. After seeing all this in action, Katrien decided it was time to create a demo video so that other developers may be aware of what’s out there.

Last friday I went back to Zaventem, where we recorded a Dutch and an English video. In these video’s I explain some of the basic concepts of Vidyano and build a demo application on top of the Adventure Works database. If you are interested in finding out how you can write applications like the one in my previous blog post, watch them on the MSDN Chopsticks site:

Interview in Dutch	Interview in English

Source

A topic I just had to resurrect from my recently deceased blog is my WPF presentation I have been giving for the past year and a half. Although some people have declared me a bit insane at the time I was making it, it certainly has made up for it by a long shot.

The fun thing about this presentation is that it is entirely written in WPF. At the time of making this, I figured it would have been sad to present a major new User Interface technology using plain old Microsoft PowerPoint. There would’ve been way to much switching between demo’s and slides. So I wrote a little PowerPoint slideshow look-a-like and have it shown my demo’s in-place.

I have updated it a bit recently so that it includes some of the latest features of WPF as well such as pixel shaders and string formats. I will update this post when I manage to get that latest build online.

In the meantime you can download the “older” presentation from my SkyDrive account (sources or binaries):

A couple weeks ago, Rhea finished the development on Cura Comfort, a software product targeting the healthcare market. Cura Comfort was created with the help of Vidyano and already turned out to be a huge success.

The goal of this project was to facilitate the end users in keeping detailed files for patients each time they visit. Also, the application needs to run on Netbook pc’s, so system requirements are something to keep a close eye on. As visits usually to take no longer that 10 minutes, entering this data in the application needed to be fast and intuitive. Master data for this application comes from another, already in production, application called Cura. This application is able to plan visits for all care providers in a doctors practice any lots more. So synchronization between these two applications had to be developed as well.

First off, a custom Vidyano skin was written for the application, which shows the client’s profile color scheme. We’ve also chosen to implement a breadcrumb system for navigating between pages in the application. As you can see in the screenshots below, the result is quite beautiful. The entire application took merely 6 weeks to develop (from start to finish) by 3 juniors and 1 senior developer.

I will try and get a short movie from the application in action, which will give you a better idea on how it works. A more detailed case study can also be found on the Vidyano website, here.

So I finally decided to make the switch. After seeing BlogEngine.NET running on the Vidyano website, I was quite impressed with its stability and the features it has to offer. My blog was previously running on WordPress. While WordPress is a very fine blogging solution, the fact that it’s running on PHP is what made me switch to a .NET based engine. To be completely honest, having to apply regular security updates to both PHP as well as WordPress became a bit of a hassle to me. Thanks to Windows Update, I can eliminate half the work there and feel a lot safer.

I am currently looking into migrating my previous blog posts to this blog. So far it has been a disaster, so I don’t know if I will make the time to persist on getting this done. I’d rather focus on new content and will probably resurrect an older topic when I see fit.

On a side note, I also started using Windows Live Writer to write blog posts. I’m very excited so far as this will definitely make it a lot easier for me to maintain this blog.