Engenious Product Portal

Added more certifications to the user profile.  The CompTIA profile page now included Project Management certifications as well as six sigma certifications.

Updated the documentation to include those certifications.

Added a new profile option.  Move Backlog to Not Submitted Status.  Selection of this option will automatically change the status of prospects that have a status of Backlog to Not Submitted if the closing date has been past.  To be safe we will leave the job prospect in the Backlog category an extra day before changing its status.

Took a week off to write a GUI front end for a company named Cloudpak.   They are doing some pretty high end stuff dealing with saving and viewing images from the Cloud.  What they are working on is primarily for the medical research community (I think) where they have images that are 100MB plus in size.  Not the kind of images that most of us would ever generate.

In any case, Sept 9, 2010 was D day.  Deployment day, meaning that I officially told the world about VitaeWho and am starting to accept registrations. 

I'm pretty much done with the program until I see how much it is accepted.  There is a little finish up work for me, writing a back end administrative stuff.  It's mostly practice on the programming skills I picked up in Silverlight 4.  I will focus my attention on the web site, . . . do I really want to internationalize that? 

It's time to think seriously about re-writing the Green Lake Crew web site.  Primarily, I'm considering re-writing the entire photo viewing section in Silverlight.  It would be really neat and a great next step from the format that I developed about 10 years ago.  It is in need of an overhaul.  The web site too. 

Just posted a new version on line.  This supports English, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German and Russian.  There still needs to be work on localization, but at least I have something to show for my efforts.  What needs to be done is to localize the registration and logon labels, the Column headers for the prospect grid and the contacts table, and to get people who actually speak the language to tell me if the translations make sense.

I am contemplating even localizing all the options in the profiles, . . . but that can wait until I get a better sense of the who is using the program.  Unless I get some unexpected comments soon, I am just about ready to talk about the program on FaceBook and LinkedIn, and my email database.

Have only been working on this part time. 

VitaeWho will suport english, spanish, italian, french, german, japanese, and russian on my next release.  So far, it is coming along steadily, It appears that the only UI thing that I can't localize is the headings on top of the grid, otherwise, it should be fairly complete. I'm not sure how it will work yet.  Aside from coming up in that language if your machine is localized for it, I am thinking of providing an option to switch it for the session.  That might be a good way to generate feedback on my translations.

For each user profile, there is an option to select the culture that you prefer.  So if you set that to russian, the program should run in russian regardless of what the machine is set as. 

I finished re-doing the main data entry screen today.  I think this is it.  In my windows based prototype, I had a similar layout, when I moved to Silverlight, it overthought what I wanted to do and tried to make the form more compact by going with a master-detail type arrangement.  I didn't like the master-detail arrangement, so I switched to a right-mouse click format to hide functionality and hopefully clean up the main form.  I thought I liked that, but it turns out that I talked myself into liking in.  When Chad made some comments about the UI, I realized that I was making it much more complicated that it needed to be.

One of my concerns was that the app was taking up too much screen real estate.  I'm thinking that is an unfounded concern in this age of high resolution and large monitors. I got rid of the right mouse click and just put all the functionality up front, on each row, where they originally were located in my windows forms prototype.  The website documentation is already out of date (after less that 24 hours), so I guess I need to go back and do that.

Got up this morning and decided to set program up so that culture is included in the profile information.  This enables the user to set the culture for the program regardless of where the machine is located.  For example, if the machine is in the US and the user prefers Spanish, he could set the culture to that language (assuming we actually support that localization).  If he were to go to a internet cafe in France and pulls up the program, it would still display in Spanish, even though the localization on that machine is French.  Now all I have to do is get my text resources converted to each language I want to support!

Spent the rest of the day doing a documentation page for the web site.  From a formatting standpoint, it is really tough to beat the presentation of a Word Document or PDF.  I wrote the documentation in Word, but transferred it to the Portal format.  Not great, but it will do. 

Today was an interesting day.  I focused on deploying my app to its final website location.  For testing, I was deploying to in internal virtual server, and then to an ISP website that was dedicated to the application (vitaewho.engenious.net).  The final location for VitaeWho is really going to be with the www.engenious.net website.

Today is the day when I finally move it there to see what will happen.  Took most of the day to get it running and working with  the ISP to enable the application as part of a larger website.  The most interesting thing that happened was that when running the program from the ISP, dates were displayed in day/month/year format, whereas, when running on my servers, it is the more traditional month/day/year format.  After looking into it, I have decided that it might be a Microsoft bug.  I'm checking with them for a workaround.

Decided to take a closer look at data validation.   As it turns out, I need to spend more time looking at how to do it using the data scheme that the application is employing. 

Decided I did not like using right mouse clicks to access the URL and Resume/Cover Letter information, so I put them back in the grid there it is accessible at a single click.  Those features are still enabled in the right mouse click, but I don't expect many people will access those features from there. The right mouse click is still where you would go to insert new records, delete records, change status of prospects and access contacts for each position.  I think those are ok for the right mouse click, although inserting new job prospects might get moved to the button on top.

Today is a better day.  I feel like I'm making progress.  Most of my mental energy really hasn't been working on code the past couple of days, it's trying to figure out how to integrate a Silverlight 4 application with my new website portal and for that matter I really want to use a portal.

Finally fixed the problem with updating the list of prospects. While fixing that, I cleaned up the interface as much as I could and moved all the necessary features to right mouse click action on the datagrid.  Now right mouse clicking on the grid will present a menu that enables you to add, delete prospects, change the status of a prospect, manage contacts associated with the prospect, mange/view the url for the original posting and manage the resume and or cover letter that is attached to the prospect.  Most of the features have been fully implemented with the exception of the delete. 

Today, while working on context menus (right mouse click) for the datagrid, I found out that sometime in the last couple of days, I broke the ability to save changes, then update the grid display.  For some reason, after saving changes, the Update button remains disabled.  Don't know what happened, an am not happy about it.  If you click on the About or Home button then back to the Prospects button, everything works again.  Good thing I'm still in alpha release.

This is my program and I think about it all the time.  Having said that, the last several days have been really interesting.  Now that the program is working well enough to look at what I have done, it allows me to sit back and consider the possibilities.  I have been adding features at a pretty good clip.  These are all things that did not occur to me until I could sit down and play with the program.  It is brainstorming in hindsight and being critical of the features that are apparently missing, after the product is working.

Makes me wonder how big software houses can hire a project manager, tell him to do the needs assessment and write a functional spec that the client can buy off on before coding.  Can't be done unless you have a lot of money and time.  Well, either way, it takes a lot of time to develop software because it isn't done until your'e sick of  working on it.

My own experience is that what sound like a good idea, might not be after you code it, and sometimes (especially when you are learning the programming platform), it takes much too long to figure how to code the great idea.  Product development has gone from guys writing code in a garage to teams wearing suits telling guys wearing jeans what they want programmed.  A lot of times, this is great, but I have to wonder if functional specs is the cause of mediocre code.  Sure, it's bug free, but I wonder if it stifles creativity in product development.

I'm sure there are guys with the foresight to envision the final product.  I'm not one of them. I don't know what I like until I see it.