We’ve been doing some more research on the power of WPF. And it appears you can design the user interface to change according to the theme that is in use. This seems like a nice add-on to our program.
We are also looking into some custom controls to draw charts and graphs for projection outlooks, as well as a new look for history checks. Yes, this program will be the best Carrier Companion yet!
More to come!
Well, I’m still tossing around on how I want users to enter or choose the date and time in Carrier Companion. One way is to provide a chooser that will allow the user to choose the date or time. Or, I could use a standard textbox, and allow the user to enter the date or time in the format of MM/DD/YYYY or similar.
The only problem is that in Windows forms you can enter the date like so: MM.DD.YY(YY) and the control will automatically fill out the rest. I may just write a control that is similar to the date/time control in Windows Forms. Mainly the problem is the way the control binds to the data. I want most of the UI coding to go on XAML, and the functionality to stay on the code behind, you know, keep each of them in their own space.
Once we get past this problem, the rest should fall into place. We’ll keep you posted!
There were a couple of holes that were patched up.
There was a hole in the coding on 3.14 that did not allow you to save the changes to Routes General Information. These holes have been removed and the program should function normally.
It seems the latest update may be failing to uninstall the previous version. If you are experiencing a failing update, and it seems that Carrier Companion is telling you that an update is available after installing the latest version, you may be a culprit of this bug.
To solve it, just uninstall the previous version manually. And then install the latest version. I really don’t know why this happened as it only started happening recently (Around late March/early April).
After figuring out the the pluses and minuses of XAML and WPF, I’ve decided to redo the data entry wizards.
Instead of entering a small amount of data for each screen, we’re placing all the data that could be entered on one screen.
For example: Entering a Route
Before you had to:
Now, we’ll place all this information on one page with expanders. Expander are much like the expanders in Windows XP and after.
Here is a screen shot of the new wizards for entering Carriers:
Carriers with the expander closed.
And here is the same window with the expander open. Notice how the presentation scrolls? 
Ok, heading back to work, just letting you know the latest developments!
I’ve been playing around with the new .NET 3.5 and Windows Presentation Foundation.
It seems to offer quite a punch of options to design truly compelling user interfaces. So much so, that I’ve decided to create a new carrier companion that encapsulates this foundation.
Some of the downsides I’ve seen is the bitmap effects I’ve seen is the high CPU usage. Especially the drop-shadow effect.
I did, however find a workaround to the drop-shadow. That is to create a copy element and place it where I wanted the drop show to go.