Time to get your discount on X-tensive products

Hey guys, great news for you!

If you are interested in getting a discount on DataObjects.Net or HelpServer, take a look at this link and this one.

On blog changes

Hi there,

Recently members of DataObjects.Net team have finally agreed on principal alteration of news and announces publishing policy. By this I mean that in order not to spread your attention between several personal blogs we decided to concentrate on exactly one, dedicated to DataObjects.Net development. So I’d strongly recommend you to update your RSS subscriptions.

In case you are interested in using the ORM under Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0, there is a big announce for you, don’t you miss it!

Thanks for your attention!

Update on Envy project

Despite the fact that the initial post concerning Envy project was published on April, 1st, it was not a joke as you might thought. We really were going to deliver all that sort of stuff (standalone editor, plug-ins for various IDE and everything). But one thing has changed. I am very pleased to announce that TytanNet project came back to life and its author is going to continue his work on this excellent product. But how such a good bit of news might influence Envy?

It is rather obvious. As me & Denis were thinking that TytanNet is being supported no more and that there was no any chance that it would be updated to meet Visual Studio 2010’s plug-in infrastructure requirements, we decided to develop a version of Envy which could be plugged-in to various IDEs such as Visual Studio, SharpDevelop, etc. As far as the necessity of such sort of plug-ins is no more actual (TytanNet has its own powerful environment editor), we can concentrate on standalone application which is intended to replace standard Windows environment variable editor.

To be honest, the main goal of the project is a temptation to combine the idea of getting more familiar with new technologies such as WPF, MVVM, etc., with development of a simple but useful application, at least for us or may be anyone else also.

In case you still doubt that I am sincere, here is the link to the repository.

Here is a blueprint of the main window:

As you might noticed, it is rather simple and straightforward. Add/Remove, in-place editing, apply or discard, nothing special.

BTW, thanks to Kenny Kerr for his excellent window clipping tool.

I’ll write more on Envy development in the upcoming posts. Stay tuned.

The birth of Envy project

Introduction

“Envy” goes for an advanced environment variables editor that has a standalone version as well as plug-ins for various IDE.

The very idea of creating such kind of stuff came spontaneously to me and Denis Krjuchkov while we were discussing the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010 in terms of compatibility with plug-ins made for the previous versions (VS 2005/2008). As you know, both of us at the current moment work for X-tensive company in a rather ambitious project called DataObjects.Net 4. In the project the approach with unit tests configuration through specialized environment variables is widely used.

In order to cope with such kind of task Tytan.Net plug-in for Visual Studio 2005/2008 is utilized. It provided the ability to manage environment variables of Visual Studio's process, but unfortunately had several minor drawbacks, for example, environment variables editor had quite poor keyboard support, it has no ability to remember variable values set in previous sessions, etc. The most important one is the fact that the project's development had stopped, so there is no any chance that the plug-in for Visual Studio 2010 will ever be released.

Thus, we came to the idea that we should make an attempt to create at least a replacement for it, a better replacement, we hope. In addition, the standard environment variables editor in Windows OS is the ugliest thing I've ever seen, especially when you have to edit the PATH variable. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? =) So why don’t just kill two birds with one stone and create the plug-ins as well as standalone one?

The vision

We are going to deliver a convenient and user-friendly environment variables editor which can be used as a standalone applications or can be plugged-in into Visual Studio 2008/2010 and SharpDevelop.

List of features:

1. Simple and intuitive user interface
2. Full keyboard support
3. Automatic multiline editing for variables with multiple values, such as PATH
4. Standalone application – a replacement of standard Windows environment variables editor
5. Plug-in for Visual Studio 2008/2010 & SharpDevelop
6. Ability to save and load a set of variables from external files.

The roadmap

Version 0.1 – Standalone application, just a window which contains a grid with 3 columns: variable acope, name & value. The 2 latter columns are editable. The form contains 2 buttons: Save & Discard which updates environment variables and resets the state of the grid contents to initial one, accordingly. In-place name & value column editing & variable removing are possible.

Version 0.2 – The same standalone application but with some features such as:

• Filtering by text pattern
• Multiline editing
• Adding new variable

Version 0.3 – The standalone application again, but with another set of features:

• Full keyboard support
• Variable values history (remember a list of previous values for variables)
• Application settings & auto-update

Version 0.4 – Plug-in for Visual Studio 2008. The source code of Tytan.Net should be investigated in order to find out how to create and register a plug-in into Visual Studio. At this step the installer will be provided as well because the procedure of plug-in registration might require additional steps.

Version 0.5 – Plug-in for Visual Studio 2010. As it is reported that the plug-in API in Visual Studio 2010 changed significantly, this step might take more time than the previous one.

Version 0.6 – Plug-in for SharpDevelop 3/4.

In the future posts I’ll write more detailed information about our competitors, development model, software architecture and so on. Stay tuned.

P.S.
Happy April Fools' Day! =)

A bit proud of myself

Sometimes it just happens =)

Recently, online banking service (Bank24.ru), frontend part of which had been designed and developed by me & my colleagues, Yuri Kurzhumov & Dmitri Govoruhin, was highly valued and won the first place prize in online banking services contest held in Russia.

 

Although I don’t work for Bank.ru anymore, I am proud of the result and I’d like to congratulate all the staff from Information Technology Department of Bank24.ru who participated in any way in creating, developing and maintaining the best national online banking service. My special congrats to: Alexey Vinogradov, Anna Mamaeva, Boris Dyakonov, Eugene Samoilov, Igor Karfidov, Olga Urchenko, Pavel Gushin, Sergei Vedeneev & Tatjana Talykova. Great work!

Me on Google Buzz

Hello All,

here is my Google Buzz link: http://www.google.com/profiles/Dmitri.Maximov#buzz

I find it a bit more convenient than blog for sharing short ideas, publishing links to good articles and everything quick and small-sized.

Stay tuned! =)

Busy people versus effective people

The excellent essay “The cult of busy” by Scott Berkun about time, efficiency, busy people and everything. Don’t miss it.

It seems that it is rather easy nowadays to become extremely busy, but will you be efficient enough to sort out the problems? The answer is not so obvious and might surprise you.