Building an application (2) ...

.. coming full circle

In the first part of this journey I have sketched the outlines of my application. The combination of web pages, web service and Silverlight as I plan to build it.

Jumping hurdles and dodging bullets

While building and debugging I have run into numerous obstacles. Not only did Chrome give me an unexpected headache by not refreshing the Silverlight XAP file in the cache, also Visual Studio behaved weirdly during debugging sessions. At first I couldn't make any of the breakpoints work. Only after using the context menu on the web service and picking 'Debug - Start a new instance' did execution break at the breakpoints. And then after a couple of hours it failed all breakpoints completely. Restart of Visual Studio and browser did not work. A full reboot did the job.

BTW I have logged a bug with Chromium for the caching problem.

However

My Proof of Concept piece of spaghetti has now come full circle:

1. I drag and drop some players, balls on the pitch.
2. Enter some extra info: name of the excercise and some extra text.
3. Save the data to the data base using the web service.
4. The asynchronous callback adds some html to the DOM, which is an image that is generated by a special HttpHandler.
5. The image shows up in the browser.
6. I have a smile on my face.

Lots of work to do

Image via Wikipedia

There is still lots of work to do:

• a real user interface has to be designed
• better, I need to sit down and get the complete UX designed
• have to add the boring user authentication stuff
• try out the concept on a real web server
• implement some of the missing graphical pieces, like lines with arrows
• think of good way of editing the lines
• undo / redo ?
• make the database complete
• add functionality for picking existing excercises, sharing these, copying, editing etc.

Yep, there is lots to do and so little time.

A little bit more tchnical info in Part 3.

How Microsoft made me leave Google Chrome

.. well, not really

As I wrote in my previous post I am busy building a Silverlight application. This week I did some more work and ran into some very weird behavior.

I was debugging the communication between the Silverlight app and the web service and I ran into very strange errors. I noticed that in my final call in the webservice two string values were assigned to the wrong variables. They were swapped. The variable username held a piece of xml and the variable drawingXml held the username. Looking through my code I could not find the line of code where I made the mistake.

It was getting late already and this is still a POC, so I decided to just swap the place of the parameters in the method definition and investigate further at some other moment.

I stopped the debugger, made the change, inserted a breakpoint and started debugging again. That's when I completely lost any understanding of what was going on.

It was late already as I said and I blamed that and I was too tired to think straight and probably was debugging at the wrong place in the application. I decided it had to be me and had to just let it be. I walked a block with the dog and went to bed

The next day

The problem stuck and I had to investigate further so I started to change my Silverlight application so it would show some debug info in the browser to make things easier to debug.

That's where things started to go even crazier. The Silverlight application didn't show anything. The TextBlock I had added to the XAML wasn't showing up! I tried again and again. But nothing!

Image via Wikipedia

Then I realized that Google Chrome (my default browser) had a problem with caching. The Silverlight application in the browser was an old version of the application. Apparently, Chrome was not refreshing the XAP file!

Googling about I saw some posts about the same problems developers had with Flash. Then I sighed and I knew it was not me.

Google Chrome

So, that was it for me. I had to revert "back" to Firefox for debugging Silverlight applications. A weird feeling having to step away from Google Chrome.

I still remember that I watched the launch live on my laptop. I watched the first part in Firefox and started downloading during the presentation. Installed Chrome and watched the last part in Chrome. I also set it to be my default browser and only occasionally I use Firefox and other browsers. Well, I have to I build websites!

Microsoft made me do it

So, in a way Microsoft made me switch browsers, made me move away from Chrome.

But it's not that dramatic. I only use Firefox now for debugging Silverlight and for day to day browsing I still use Chrome.

Had I been a Flash developer, it would have been Adobe that made me switch from Chrome back to Firefox. But still only for debugging.

Google OS is a browser

.. well, well, well

Today, the world was shook up by Google in almost Apple style. There was a leak a day or maybe hours earlier than it would officially be announced. Or was it on puropse? Anyhow, the blog hive was alive with buzz-buzz-buzz. Google Chrome was announced.

There has been persistent rumors about the secret Google Operating System and any self respecting Google watcher was certain that one day that would become official. And today it has, sort of.

Well, maybe not. The OS is not an OS, it's a browser. A completely new browser. Designed by today's standards and today's demands. Not building on parts of the past.

Image by l0ckergn0me via Flickr

Well a pleasant shock

This is a pleasant shock and I am really looking forward to this and how this browser will behave on my various sites I built. Will they still render as intended. I think so, since the browser uses the WebKit rendering engine.

Much greater is the anticipation about what the general public will think of it. Will they adopt it now there is browser with a really big name out there. There is big reputation at stake here. And will it nibble away more share from Google or will Firefox lose share? Will it become another tech toy for nerds and proffesionals?

Uhm and then this

Also today I came across this article explaining how IE8 behaves on a Windows system. How much memory it grabs and how much processor power it needs. Astonishing! Compare that with the story of Google Chrome and you can only shake your head.

Watching the official announcement

Doing some live blogging ;-)

• It surely does look sexy.
• The Omni Box seems more versatile than the Smart Bar, good name.
• Web application becoming very much like desktop applications
• There is a Porno Switch as well!
• Crashing a browser will only crash tab, that's cool. I have seen and still see crashes of Firefox and IE and those ARE annoying!
• WebKit is blistering fast!
• Who wouldn't want a V8 under the hood? And what about a V8 running your JavaScript?
• Built on Danish Virtual Machine expertise. Hidden classes, hmm, interesting.
• Ha! I am already downloading!
• Downloading and installing takes less than two minutes to get started as well! Again blistering fast!
• 20:58 local time I am now editing this blog post in Google Chrome! I might be one of the first in the World!!!
• LOL ".. based on my extensive testing for the last three minutes"
• LOL Statistics for nerds
• I am really impressed, but will still hold on to Firefox for the time being, but also will be using Google Chrome!

So, I had a quick look at one the statistics that run on my site to see what the Chrome browser is identfied as and .. Lo and behold! It's being recognized as Safari 1.3! This will no doubt be fixed pretty soon. But there is also a mention of Chrome there.

Blog log

Safari 1.3 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Fun!

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