TechEd-2012 North America

I watched live streaming keynotes and other webcasts online presented in the recent TechEd 2012 held in orlando (TechEd-2012) and my main take away from this event is the way we should design UI going ahead and the way we should present the content to the end user.

Yes the main theme and highlight in TechEd was metro style applications.The metro style applications (which is rich in content and easy to interact with multiple input devices) showed in this event changed my view on the UI design.All the traditional GUIs I look at it now are rich in controls  ,some times GUI designers forget about the content what it displays.i.e I see those GUIs (including any application developed & running on windows platform.Note:- I'm a windows guy and not in position to comment about other OS platforms)  "very loud" in controls instead of being rich in content.Hmmm what did I do next day....

I installed windows 8 (download release preview from here here) in my laptop and started play with it to learn some design principles around metro style apps with an intension to apply some design principles in my new project.

I found below links useful,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/hh464920.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465424.aspx

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/DEV354

 
Hopes you will find these useful too .....  

Deserializing XML to Dynamic Object in C#

Little bit background about this blog entry – most of the applications today are driven by (BIG) settings file (usually in XML format) , this is absolutely fine and will work as expected. Let’s look at a real world scenario of XML driven applications – suppose user wants an extra feature which is controlled based on an entry in the XML settings file that means we have to handle that extra settings parameter in our application.

Not a BIG deal; we could do it in following ways
#1) if you are using a custom XML Settings parser then change it (add XPATH/read node attribute etc.) - Old fashion approach :-(.
Or
#2) Create a new XML schema from XML and use XSD.exe to generate classes from the schema (if it simple change like adding attribute etc. then you can modify the auto generated class file directly ) ;And deserialize the XML to an object and use this object everywhere.
Or
#3) LinqToXML
etc...

Since I came from strong OOPS background I personally prefer to use everything as objects, so obviously my choice is second one (of course I won’t generate class file from schema for every change!!! )
These patterns are good still I was looking something DYNAMIC until DotNet 4.0 released with ‘dynamic’ type support.

Let’s look at an example with ‘Dynamic’ type(these are samples so keeping it simple as possible :-) to explain the idea)

In version 1.0 of settings (config) file [application will read this settings file and set the button text – simple yaaaa ],

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<UISettings >
<Button Text="Show Data" />
</UISettings>

//Code snippet
dynamic settingObject = SomeXmlToDynamicObjectParser.Parse(“Settings.xml”);
Then real beauty,
MyForm.btnData.Text = settingObject.Button.Text;

Now in version 2.0 of settings ,suppose we have added one more button setting (i.e. width)

<? version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<?UISettings>
<Button Text="Show Data" Width="50" />
</UISettings>

//Code snippet
dynamic settingObject = SomeXmlToDynamicObjectParser.Parse(“Settings.xml”);
MyForm.btnData.Text = settingObject.Button.Text;
MyForm.btnData.Width = double.Parse(settingObject.Button.Width); (So simple yaaa!!!!)

I started to love this pattern and applied in many BIG xml driven production applications.(This is just my view if you have a different opinion or better approach please share in comment section).

You can find the implementation of ‘SomeXmlToDynamicObjectParser’ Here.

Happy Coding Days ….

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