Wow, what a difference the Dashboard is. Its a total revamp, and I totally like it. Amazing work these guys put into this Blog CMS.

Today I also experimented briefly with the Extended Desktop feature that comes with some graphics accelerators. I am specifically referring to one that I have running on a HP laptop. What this particular accelerator does is allow you to create an extended desktop,  and with that feature you can run the Presenter view in Powerpoint, which basically allows you to run the presentation without the audience seeing the details of the PowerPoint interface. In other words all they get to see is the Slide Show, nothing else of what you are doing. So, I decided to create a little WPF application that has a width greater than the monitor size, and low and behold it overflows onto the other screen. This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly PowerPoint is not great for everything, and one thing it is not good at is displaying data. This often means that if you have an Access Database you will have to write some VBA code to extract that data and display it. So I thought that maybe the other option could be to write a WPF app that displays content on an extended desktop.  If that works its quite feasible to write better logic for everthing and actually use relational data.

Admittedly to myself I have not been spending enough time learning all the core OO concepts that lead to bigger concepts such as MVC and Multitier-architectures. So I thought I would start reading about these and other important concepts because I felt that my existing understanding of these concepts lacked foresight, so-to-speak. Its easy enough to abstract real world objects into classes for a C# application, but that somehow doesn’t cover enough. I mean, sure, I could have 20 classes that I took from a real world situation, but does that mean its truly object oriented. I read an article on IBM’s website that lists several best practices, and point no 4 mentions kinds of reuse, which got me thinking. Am I really applying good OO? Am I just abstracting for the sake of abstracting or is there a clear goal? I can be honest and say that I have not had any code of mine re-used in at least three different projects by at least three different project teams.

What is a class? What is an object? As all developers should know by now, an object is an instance of a class, in other words at the point of its existence an object represents a class. My own person is an instance of the human class, for example. The object oriented paradigm makes it very easy to define real world objects (classes), and some key concepts that go with the OO paradigm are, and specifically C#:

• Class: A class is like a blueprint for an object, it defines the common characteristics found in a group of objects.
• Object: An object is an instance of a class.
• Abstraction: Abstraction allows you to simplify complex real-world objects
• Encapsulation: Encapsulation is a term that describes the nature of the relationships between objects and specifically means that each objects internal functions are hidden from other objects.
• Generalisation (Inheritance): Objects (classes) can inherit the properties or functions from other classes, and also have their own
• Polymorphism: Methods that belong to a parent class can be transformed (with the same name) by a child class to perform another function.
• Interfaces: An interface acts as a contract between itself and a class. A class the implements an interface is obliged to execute all the methods within that interface.

All these concepts are quite meaningless with a few good code examples. I mean if someone asked you to display your understanding of these concepts, would you be able too?

Okay so today I did a few interesting things, the first of which was to setup Vista and XP on the same network, and I must be totally honest, its not as difficult or insane or bad as this one guy at a computer shop told me. The impression he gave me was that Vista and XP were like totally incompatible, and of course I found this to NOT be the case. I was able to share files, and do a few TS sessions. Not sure what the hidden dangers are here. I would love to have Windows Server 2008 actually, with IIS 7.

I also did some more VBA today. Now before you cringe there is one important thing that people need to realise in today’s situations and that is that solutions that work ultimately win over customers, whether you use VBA or C# to achieve it, it doesn’t matter really. I must say that I have to force myself not to type a semicolon after each line of VBA code. The VBA code I looked at again was creating PowerPoint presentations from Access. This is useful when you use a lot of presentations on a regular basis, and the information being used in them can be normalised, and made more reusable.