Software and UX

Visual Studio 2010 comes with support for adding Runtime Intelligence to your software out-of-the-box (courtesy of PreEmptive Solutions). Runtime Intelligence allows you to implement something like Microsoft Office’s Customer Experience Improvement Program (think of it as the desktop equivalent of web analytics).

I have tried this with Scrum Sprint Monitor, and it really is as simple as sprinkling an Attribute on strategic places in your code to track the functionality you are interested in. With CodePlex providing support for acting as an endpoint for uploading those statistics right at each projects’ page, this makes for a very compelling proposition indeed.

This is the end result after a few minutes of integration:

After having spent about an hour trying out this support, I came to the conclusion that there are still a couple of rough edges for broad adoption of this solution for serious Open Source projects. Here is my comment to Brandon Siegel’s post at PreEmptive Solutions’ blog:

UPDATE: Shortly after this blog was posted, PreEmptive got in touch with me and let me know they were knocking down roadblocks in order to make these open source stories a reality, and a solution should emerge within about a month. Great show on their part!

“I think the product has great potential, and the CodePlex/PreEmptive partnership could become a great story. However, for that to happen for anything other than the simplest of projects, a couple of things would need to happen:
- Serious open source projects use some kind of automated build, which will not work with PreEmptive because the MSBuild task is only available for Pro licenses.
- The attributes that are required in the source code (unless someone would ever want to edit those values in the UI every time the software is to be released) depend on a PreEmptive-owned DLL that cannot be redistributed. As such, the Open Source project owner cannot upload the DLL to the project source code repository.

These two situations will make the proposition a deal breaker, which is a shame, considering the benefit that Open Source projects could reap with little effort (I have completed that effort for Scrum Sprint Monitor, but now I have my hands tied with this situation).

Best regards,
Pedro”

Here is hoping that PreEmptive Solutions goes the extra mile to allow the Runtime Intelligence story to be a very successful one.

The other day I had to reinstall the machine that I had running Scrum Sprint Monitor. Having done the last installation over a large span of time, I had forgotten all the steps that are required to get a good set up, so I took some time to write down a documentation page detailing the process.

… And saving on utility bills while you’re at it! What I’m about to show you is a way to wake up your machine remotely with nothing more than a Twitter client and a small utility running on one of the machines at your office/campus.

Abridged version

To get the utility that allows you to wake up a machine from a Twitter direct message, you need to go to the project’s home page at CodePlex. The source code is also available.

The problem…

Back in 2004, when it started becoming practical to use Remote Desktop to access my office machine, I started taking advantage of that to get more stuff done from home. Unfortunately, that required leaving the office machine turned on the whole time, 24/7, as I never knew when I might need to access it again. As you can imagine, this is terribly inefficient energetically (although arguably efficient in economic terms, as you could reason that the work done from home more than pays for the cost of the electricity bill).

Over the years, I have toyed with the idea of being able to remotely wake up my machine upon demand, leaving it in sleep mode or in hibernation mode during off-hours. I tried Wake-on-LAN, and although I could easily set it up within two machines in the office, our VPN box seemed to interfere with the communications required to wake up the machine. I needed a way to bypass the VPN…

My solution (and my first practical use for Twitter!)

Fast forward to 2010: with the advent of social networking platforms with open APIs, and the proliferation of free client software and libraries to access them, I now had all the tools I needed to quickly build a small mash up application that would sit on the server and react on Twitter direct messages. I started devising the requirements for such a tool:

• Have low impact on the machine (no installation or 3rd party products to install);
• Must be usable by everyone at the office, not just me;
• Will take requests, and reply back once your machine is online. I immediately thought of Hanselman’s toy project, Tweet Sandwich. That was pretty much what I needed as far as the basic logic. However, instead of printing orders, my utility would run a piece of networking code that would take care of waking up a machine in the local network.
  

  How does it work?

  The simple answer is that you will be creating a file with an entry on each line for each machine you want to be able to wake up (normally one for each co-worker). Each line contains:

• the Twitter screen name of the person;
• the MAC address of the machine’s network card (you can type ipconfig /all at the Command Prompt to find out the address); and
• the machine name or IP address.

When the utility app receives a special message from a given befriended Twitter account, it broadcasts a Magic Packet to the network, containing the MAC address of the specific machine, which will cause that machine to wake up. Twitter Buttler then checks whether the machine is now online and will fire back a Direct Message to the Twitter user letting him now that his machine is now turned on. At this point, the user can connect to his machine and carry on working.

Note: for you to be able to send direct messages to the utility app, the accounts listed in the config file need to follow the account used in Twitter Buttler, and vice-versa.

The are two commands you can currently send to Twitter Buttler: “wake up”, and “who’s online?”. They are pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t go into them here.

Give it a try if you normally leave your office machine running for no good reason other than to be able to access it from home. Every little step counts in the quest to reduce our carbon footprint, and as the data suggests, there is quite a lot to be gained by just leaving our machines turned off.

Today I decided to encapsulate the circular progress indicator I use in Scrum Sprint Monitor in a reusable behavior. This served as a learning experience as well, since I had not yet had the chance to play with attached behaviors. My requirements were the following:

• Have a behavior that displays an animation during long running operations. It should dim out a defined region in the UI, optionally preventing input into that region. All state transitions must be animated.
• Have minimal impact on the logical tree.
• Allow configuration of parameters, such as dim brush, transition duration, etc.

This problem turned out to be a perfect candidate to writing a behavior, and I needed only a few hours to crank it out. Here is a short video demoing it:

This behavior makes use of the simple and great Circular Progress Bar control by Sasha Barber, up on CodeProject. You can easily replace the control used for the animation though, should you require a different one.

Usage

The behavior has a simple requirement, that it can only be attached to a Grid element (I believe that is a requirement that can easily be satisfied, in most projects). The only required property is the BusyState property, which tells the behavior when to do its work:

<Grid DataContext="{Binding Path=ConfigurationViewModel, Source={StaticResource serviceLocator}}"
      Behaviors:BusyIndicatorBehavior.BusyState="{Binding IsBusy}"
      Behaviors:BusyIndicatorBehavior.TargetVisual="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource FindAncestor, AncestorType={x:Type Grid}}}">

The behavior works by adding a Visual Tree at runtime under the attached DependencyObject (the Grid). You connect your Busy state flag by providing a Binding to the BusyState attached property. There are a few other optional properties you can use, to customize things such as the dimming brush, the transition duration, margins, etc.

The source code is available for download from the Microsoft Expression Community Gallery. Do leave some feedback if you have any suggestions, or if you just find it useful.

If you want to take a look at source code that uses this behavior, head to the Scrum Sprint Monitor project at CodePlex, and search for Behaviors:BusyIndicatorBehavior.

As I was going through the UI of the Scrum Sprint Monitor to introduce animations to the larger UI elements, one type of property was proving difficult to animate: the dynamic background color of some elements which were bound to Brush (or Color) properties of the ViewModel.

Picture this: you have a Color property that is currently Green. At some point it changes to Red. You would like the UI to update smothly, so you would not see the color jump from Green to Red. You are not able to do this in XAML with triggers and storyboards directly. The problem lies in the fact is that the Animation objects in XAML cannot be bound to dynamic values (see instances here and here), as they must be frozen for performance and thread safety reasons.

<DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModels:BuildStatusBackgroundViewModel}">
    <Grid Background="{Binding Path=BuildStatusColor}" />
</DataTemplate>

Therefore there is no point in trying to introduce triggers (be it EventTriggers or DataTriggers) in this Grid element. What I ended up doing is deriving a class from Grid and spawning the animation from code behind.

<DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModels:BuildStatusBackgroundViewModel}">
    <Controls:BuildStatusBorder />
</DataTemplate>

See the code-behind example here. I did encounter a pitfall while developing this approach. I ran into a “Cannot freeze this Storyboard timeline tree for use across threads” exception, when the animation was kicked off. I fixed this by cloning the existing property value, essentially removing any data binding from the property.

Hope this helps someone who is running into the same problem of animating transitions between databound properties!

UPDATE: The same functionality is now available out of the box using the Blend 3 SDK, through the FluidMoveBehavior. Just drag that behavior to your container panel, and set the Duration and AppliesTo properties! The only difference is that easing functions are not yet supported in WPF. We will need to wait until WPF 4 is released.

Last evening I finally implemented a long awaited feature (by me!) in the Scrum Sprint Monitor: animated WPF panels. As the team members in the Sprint move up and down the list (an ObservableCollection<>), get added or removed, I always wished that change could be animated. My current knowledge of the WPF layout mechanism wasn’t sufficient to finish on that endeavor within a few hours, though.

I finally found a blog post that set me on the right path, on Ed Foh’s blog. Ed in turn was inspired by Kevin Moore’s WPF Bag of Tricks, which also includes an Animating Tile Panel.

Here is a video demonstrating the enhanced behavior of my AnimatedUniformGrid:

Why those two solutions didn’t work for me

Both of the aforementioned solutions contained hardwired positioning logic, though. I simply needed to add the animation behavior to StackPanel, WrapPanel and UniformGrid, not a completely custom panel. Ideally, the solution would be a behavior that could be added on top of those containers. That particular aspect wasn’t realized, and I ended up deriving classes for each of these panels, prefixing the new classes with “Animated”. It is still a pretty acceptable solution. UPDATE: I eventually found this was the same approach taken by at least one commercial offer.

The following is the code required to instantiate the uniform grid (note how you simple need to prefix the panel class with Wpf:Animated):

<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding TeamMembersIncludingUnassigned}">
    <ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
      <ItemsPanelTemplate>
         <Wpf:AnimatedUniformGrid Duration="00:00:01" />
      </ItemsPanelTemplate>
   </ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
</ItemsControl>

Adding animation to an existing panel control class

The workflow for converting an existing Panel to an AnimatedPanel is pretty easy:

1. derive a new class from the desired panel class (prefix it with Animated);
2. override the ArrangeOverride method in the new class (don’t call the base class implementation);
3. using .NET Reflector, extract the ArrangeOverride method contents from the base class implementation, and simply substitute the element.Arrange call that is performed for each child for a call to the AnimatedPanelHelper.ArrangeChild() static method.

That is all you need to do!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ed Foh and Kevin Moore for their great work.

Download the source code here.

The other day I needed to make an application (a screensaver to be more exact) run under lower privilege in Windows 7. The application worked fine in Windows 2003, but something must have changed in Windows 7, because the screensaver was no longer running under my user account. In the end, this meant I had to move the application settings from User level to App level. It should have been a straightforward operation: simply change the level of each setting to Application, in the Visual Studio 2008 project settings page. The problem is that if you do that, the settings will become read-only.

A quick search through the web told me I would need to roll my own solution, using the ExeConfigurationFileMap class, and that is what I did at http://scrumsprintmonitor.codeplex.com/sourcecontrol/changeset/view/26836?projectName=scrumsprintmonitor#643147. Here are some observations about the implementation:

• The settings file is hand-edited (no designer support, although the value of a designer here is negligible for a small app);
• It has support for access in special scenarios, such as in a WPF designer;
• It supports read-only scenarios, throwing an exception if you try to modify the settings.

Feel free to use it in your own projects.

For the last couple of days, I have been fighting with the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (aka Prism V2) after deciding to port an experimental version of the Scrum Sprint Monitor from Prism V1. It turns out that the ninject-contrib project where I got the Ninject bootstrapper from is still using an old version of the guidance. Long story short, it turned out that most of the problems I experienced stemmed from the fact that the bootstrapper has been significantly changed in V2, and I had not been able to find an article detailing the new layout of the bootstrapper, such as this one did for V1. The process of moving to the current version turned out somewhat painful, and I am documenting it here so that hopefully others can have an easier time going through the same process.

Updated NinjectContrib.CompositeWpf

I am attaching an updated version of the NinjectContrib.CompositeWpf project, now renamed to NinjectContrib.CompositePresentation so as to follow Prism’s naming scheme. You can drop that in as a replacement to the current version when migrating to V2.

Back to the problem at hand

I started seeing this error a lot:

"This RegionManager does not contain a Region with the name …"

Apparently, Prism V1 demanded regions to be registered before a module could register a view in it.

I set out to debug the problem. I banged my head around the DelayedRegionCreationBehavior class, wondering why the region was not appearing in the RegionManager – even though I could see it being created in response to the attached property declaration. I scoured the web for help, but no one seemed to be having the same issue (or they weren’t posting about it). Finally, on the second day I came across the UnityBootstrapper using .NET Reflector, and started seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

It turns out that some new methods and services were added in V2, missing from ninject-contrib’s implementation:

One of them adds some default behaviors:

/// <summary>
/// Configures the <see cref="IRegionBehaviorFactory"/>. This will be the list
/// of default behaviors that will be added to a region.
/// </summary>
protected virtual IRegionBehaviorFactory ConfigureDefaultRegionBehaviors()
{
    try
    {
        var defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary =
            Kernel.Get<IRegionBehaviorFactory>();
        if (defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary != null)
        {
            defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary.AddIfMissing(
                "AutoPopulate", typeof(AutoPopulateRegionBehavior));
            defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary.AddIfMissing(
                "ContextToDependencyObject",
                typeof(BindRegionContextToDependencyObjectBehavior));
            defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary.AddIfMissing(
                "ActiveAware", typeof(RegionActiveAwareBehavior));
            defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary.AddIfMissing(
                SyncRegionContextWithHostBehavior.BehaviorKey,
                typeof(SyncRegionContextWithHostBehavior));
            defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary.AddIfMissing(
                RegionManagerRegistrationBehavior.BehaviorKey,
                typeof(RegionManagerRegistrationBehavior));
        }
        return defaultRegionBehaviorTypesDictionary;
    }
    catch (ActivationException)
    {
        return null;
    }
}

The other is responsible for registering any Ninject exception types considered to be root exceptions:

/// <summary>
/// Registers in the <see cref="IKernel"/> the <see cref="Type"/>
/// of the Exceptions that are not considered root exceptions
/// by the <see cref="ExceptionExtensions"/>.
/// </summary>
protected virtual void RegisterFrameworkExceptionTypes()
{
    ExceptionExtensions.RegisterFrameworkExceptionType(
        typeof(
            Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation.ActivationException
            ));
    ExceptionExtensions.RegisterFrameworkExceptionType(
        typeof(ActivationException));
}

There have also been changes in namespaces and interface names, all of which are detailed in this article. Hopefully by using the attached zip file, you will be able to sidestep these issues, and have a more painless transition to V2. I will try to get this code into the ninject-contrib project, once I find out how to do that.

Enjoy!

I hope this will help drive the adoption of the Scrum Sprint Monitor. It certainly has been a pain point for people taking a look at the tool. Scrum Sprint Monitor has now full UI-based configuration:

Hope to see those Download numbers in CodePlex go up!

I finally got around to writing documentation for the Scrum Sprint Monitor, now at version 1.0.0.80. It includes details on setup, configuration and explanation of monitor items, all with lots of screen shots. Hopefully that will help prevent people giving up on the tool for lack of assistance.