From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 31

Today I need to go back and clean up the way I did the Settings as I need to move everything into it's own Preferences class so all of those settings are in one place. Then I can move onto my favorite topic of internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N) for date/time settings. I am using a single set of default whenever I display any date/time to the user but I need to use the standard Windows Store globalization strings instead and then as the locale changes on the device it will just work perfectly so I don't need a special Setting for the time zone and date/time format. I am pretty excited about that but first I need to quickly clean up the Settings to prepare for that changes.

It took longer to completely test the change that it took to add the new class and move the code into it. So as I was reading about the ToggleSwitch yesterday there were a couple of things I wanted to try as I took the defaults for the first pass. The first thing I want to try is to customize the on/off labels and then I can use the header label and get rid of my labels. That really cleaned up my code and now I can move onto my favorite task of date/time localization.

The quick start guide is the place to start yet again as there is one called Global-Ready Formats. The place I have to start is the Remarks within the DateTimeFormatter class as it lists all of the allowed string values. The best thing about the Remarks documentation is that it also shows examples of how to use the strings. That is the best class documentation I have seen so far as it is just what I need to get my job done. The only tricky part is that the JSON data coming from the server has Date/Time information and so I need to have that format fixed to match the data and it is in a standard form of "MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss", so I kept that in place but all of the other date/time output needs to be localized. For that case I had to hard code the CultureInfo to be "en-US" as documented in the IFormatProvider class, which I found by looking at the ParseExtract method which I was already using.

Then it was just a matter of switching my code from using "DateTime.ToString(format)" to call "Windows.Globalization.DateTimeFormatting.DateTimeFormatter("shortdate longtime").Format(DateTime)" - piece of cake as that was right out of the DateTimeFormatter documentation under the Examples section. Now that is all done, it is time to completely switch gears and look into a new UI component.

That means it is time to look at the List of Windows Store controls again. I think I like the Menu Flyout so I am going to use that one and see how I like the look and interaction. My other alternative is to use a ComboBox. I need a menu to be associated with a button for a couple of choices so one of those is going to work. I am pretty happy with the Button Menu Flyout so that is what I am going with. The UI is complete so now I just need to hook that up, which should be very easy because I have my friend LINQ to help me.

Just when I thought this was going to be easy, I find out that C# is not going to help me with a deep copy of the data so I have to do it myself. At least I found a StackOverflow article that helped me do this. I also get to learn about the alternate LINQ method or lambda syntax as presented in that article as this one makes more sense to me that the syntax I have been using - but just in this case as I like the SQL like syntax in all of the other cases so far. I then went back to review all of the other LINQ statements I created to make sure they were valid and I noticed that my distinct count statements were wrong and needed to be rewritten using the lambda syntax which made a lot more sense for those cases. I used this StackOverflow article to help me.

So far yesterday was a big feature completed and today was another so I am definitely going to complete this list of new features in the allotted time and budget as if that was ever in doubt. It turns out that it is in doubt with every estimate as there are always unforeseen things that come up. I also need extra time to verify everything is absolutely correct and the data presented matches what is shown in the original Java app for the same time period.

One more small task before the day ends to create a play and stop button. I want to use the standard Segoe UI Symbol font so all I needed to know what how to set the font on the button and then the actual symbol, which resulted in the following:

                         

                           

From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 30

After a weekend break, which was not a real break since I continued to work on filtering issues for half a day on Saturday, it is now the day to complete the two remaining filter bugs. I wish I could have been done with these issues but this is such an important part of the app that I want to make sure it is all working perfectly. The last two problems as visual and relate to the location of the tick marks and labels on the Telerik RangeSliders customized for the Windows Store app. After continued struggles this weekend, I am beginning to think that maybe I am trying to force the control to do something it was no intended to do. From my experience I have done this same thing with other controls in the past so I know the request is not totally unusual. I may just have to get the tick marks and labels close enough as the working filters are the most important part and that is all working as it should be. I am going to leave that alone for today and move on.

So the big task for day is working with Windows Store app settings. So the first place to start is the generic Windows Store guidelines of Settings. Once that was read then I found probably the best quick start guide so far on how to use the new Windows 8.1 Settings service. I had to look up the ToogleSwitch class as I had not used that before and it is highly customizable. I had to look up how to set the default switch value as the IsOn property was a bit odd for me as I just assumed it I needed a slight refresher on how to define get/set accessors since the break away from C# must have caused some memory loss. I also needed to look up the best way to compare strings as well. This is kind of getting depressing that I did not remember those two things. The hardest part was figuring out how to know when the Settings flyout was closed. There is a BackClick which was easy to handle in the SettingsFlyout class.

Then in testing I found out that you can use Escape key while the Settings is up so I need to handle that case. I searched for a solution and found a sample app that did just this which really proved helpful as that just was not obvious at all. In a way it makes sense that to know when the Escape key was pressed that a global listener was needed but defining it on "Window.Current.CoreWindow" was not my first guess, second guess or ay guess for that matter. The sample app should how to have multiple pages of settings that depend on each other, which I did not need, but learning how to handle key events was a new lesson. It also required learning about Virtual Keys to check for the specific Escape key in the handler.

I then found an odd issue when the Escape was used on the keyboard and the Settings flyout went away I had a nice white outline around by AppBarToggleButton. Naturally I tried the obvious thing to do, which was remove the focus. My intuition let me down as that immediately caused an exception and when I looked up the Focus State documentation that was in the first line that doing so would cause an exception. As a work around I set focus to the main window and that fixed my problem from a keyboard stand point.

The next issue to figure out is how to know when my toggle switches have been changed in the Settings flyout. It is time again to use Data Bindings so I go back to that quick start guide. This requires a single INotifyPropertyChange interface by adding a PropertyChangedEventHandler and a very simple PropertyChangedEventArgs with the name of the property that was changed. That was not a big deal as I had dealt with those before.

The last problem was figuring out how to save my Settings once I had the flyout working correctly. That took a bit of searching but yet another great quick start article helped me understand how to solve that problem by using Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.LocalSettings. After a short break in Windows Store app coding, it makes the documentation seem even better as I have had two new things I needed to do and I found the documentation to solve both quickly.

I am pretty happy that it only took me one short day to add custom preferences for my Windows Store app.

From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 29

I will have to work on the filter changes again today as I was not able to finish them all yesterday. The big problem I encountered yesterday was that I switched the Telerik RangeSlider from "PointerReleased" to "PointerMoved". Doesn't sound like a big deal as it actually does what I want but I receive tons of extra events when the pointer in fact has not moved so now my #1 priority to figure out why and prevent that bad behavior.

Turns out that the event arguments I get in this callback is a standard Windows event called PointerRoutedEventArgs. So the real issue is that the pointer did in fact move by the slider thumb value did not changed. Time to read up on Telerik events and see if there is a custom event where I can get this information. I found absolutely no information on Telerik custom events so that must mean they always use the standard Microsoft Windows Store events. Time to read up on the pointers quick start guide as I am hoping to find a gem in there to help me get over the hump. That was interesting reading but did not help me as I am getting every pointer change, so I have to recognize within my code when the RangeSlider thumb has changed. That is pretty sad as I should be able to use the built in INotifyPropertyChange interface but if the RangeSlider does not implement it then listening to property changes for selection start and end will do me no good. In protest I went into my Telerik account to contact customer support and then realized the cheap license we got to save money did not come with support after the initial 30 days, so much for that. I am moving on as I have a solution not an elegant one I was hoping for.

There is nothing like taking time to test thoroughly all of the options. The last two days I have been testing all of the filtering from every imaginable angle. This is something I did not get a chance to do when in hurry up get everything working quickly mode. I must admit it feels really good to know with confidence that the filtering code is working exactly as it should be. It would not have been possible without the fixed TestData that I created previously with all know values. That was time well worth spent.

From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 28

It is time to resume working on some of the features that I did not have time to complete for the conference that are needed in the final product. The last time I looked at this code it was 12 days ago so I need to try to remember where I was. Thankfully I recorded all of the outstanding issues in Kanbanery so I just need to resume where I left off. I worked on a couple of other projects in the meantime so I have to settle back into this Windows Store stuff as it requires a paradigm shift.

To start off the day, I picked a couple of the simple tasks so I can warm up to working in VSE and the Windows environment. It is funny how quickly your brain reverts to comfortable things like Command-C/Command-V on my Mac versus Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V on Windows. For my first issue I had to bring up Xcode and look at the Objective-C iOS implementation so that is a crazy way to start the day by then switching to VSE and C#. I survived the simple tasks so now onto the hard ones I ignored because of time pressures...

I decided to tackle all of the Telerik slider related bugs today as those seem to be the most important parts as that is where the Windows Store app deviates the most from the iPad app. Everything I ever wanted to know is in the Telerik RangeSlider documentation as the problems I am seeing are all related to configuration issues and not issues in the Telerik control itself, mostly related to snapping and tick mark locations. I did not actually write any of that code as I farmed that out to someone else when I got in a time crunch so now it is time to learn how it was built using reusable components and style resources. This is going to be a good lesson to learn as I skipped that part of building a Windows Store app.

My son's latest artwork

My oldest son has decided to use Facebook to marketing his art work. He sent out a message to find out how many people would want a $10 portrait for the Christmas holidays. This is like right out of the Lean Startup MVP and he could care less about that book - somehow that was intuitive to him as the right thing to do - how interesting. From his Facebook responses he now has one $100 cow painting and a $200 unicorn painting commissioned. He has one more he must do for an undisclosed amount where he was told to do a painting and he would get well paid for it. The unicorn is going to travel to California so his social network has paid off quickly. My absolute favorite is the harpist and you have to see these in person to really appreciate them.

From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 27

The hardest part of the day today is figuring out what music to listen to. Not really, now I have to watch my time wisely as I have run out of billable time on this project but I need to do more manual testing on the device being sued at the conference to make sure it is working in every way without any problems. It will not take tons of time but it has to be done whether I get paid for it or not.

The first thing I had to do this morning was recap the whole project in executive summary form to give to the customer in our final meeting on Monday. I actually enjoy doing that as it reminds me how much I accomplished the last month but I constantly have to remind myself of the target audience. Not too much technical detail but enough that a valid summary can be given from the details. Kanbanery has some nice reporting features that helped me some, but it also helped me since I constantly use it to record what is needed to be done and I move the tasks when I am done. Any customer interaction is recorded as comments, which this time also helped me with a couple of summary items.

As I was testing the final changes, it suddenly came to me that what I really need to do is create a perfect test file that has an example of every single value so I can double check on more time that everything is perfect. Now that I can load data from files that is just so easy to do. Time to get serious about my test fixtures. It must have been the time pressure of this whole project that we made not think clearly.

In order to get the list of all airports in North Carolina and Virginia, I tried several sources on web and then just found the airport lists on Wikipedia and used them. The list of IATA NC airport codes and VA airport codes was used to locate all of the commercial primary airports. I then used Flight Stats to look up the complete information exception altitude which I had to use Mrs. Google on each of the airports. Most of the time the airport code would work in the search, as in "RDU altitude" and if not then I would just search for the city and use the altitude I saw in any search results match so I did not have to click on any link in the search results. If all else fails then I go to U.S. Climate Data site which always has what I need. Then I got into a roll by using a search string of "zip code near ... airport" within maps.google.com and then entered the closest city name, state name and zip code into the Maps Easy web site to get the latitude and longitude. I then traversed the USA from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California by picking major cities along the way. I then picked half way points between these 15 cities by approximating the halt way GPS coordinate. This simple GPS path of 31 points helped me find a couple more problems in the code, so it was all worth it even though it took me several hours to do it.

After a full day of work with numerous breaks, but still a full day, I am finally DONE.

From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 26

So here we are at the final day of work on what needs to be working for the conference. I ended the afternoon yesterday listening to Robin Trower and it was so pleasant that I am going to resume where I left off on Spotify this morning instead of trying to discover new music. The goal for today is to look at a couple of performance problems loading the data from the secure server and fixing the remaining two problems. It sounds easy but finding performance problems can sometimes be a big challenge. Of course the #1 task is to test, test and do more testing as it has to be super stable with no new issues introduced today when with anything I fix. As I work on this app, I constantly keep in mind that this is going to be shown to thousands of people and would I be happy to be there in person showing it?

After more than a month of working on this app, it still never ceases to amaze me when I find yet another super useful MSDN documentation page. This morning I was considering adding a hyperlink to my UI and so I used Ms. Google to search for "windows store xaml controls" and found this useful list of controls with thumbnails of what they look like with code used to create them. Then they have a list of all of the controls by function. Those pages are just so useful to someone starting out. Wait, that was me a month ago. I guess I am a little slow. It kinds of reminds me of the Adobe Flex Showcase. Some days I think there is definitely nothing new under the sun as the employees at Microsoft just learned from other tools what works well and then borrow the ideas and improved on them. I don't know which came first Adobe Flex MXML or Windows XAML but Apple Storyboards are the exact same idea and I know they came later than MXML or XAML.

When I was looking thru the controls list, I see they support tooltips. I still find this really odd on a touch device. I know from using Windows 8 that touch and hold results in a difference action from touching but that is not obvious since that gesture does not exist on Apple devices. Maybe it should be it does not.

Before going to too crazy, I wanted to go back to my existing Kanbanery stories and add references to the MSDN documentation on how I would solve the problems, just in case someone else picks up those tasks in the future. Even if it is me, then many weeks from now I am not going to remember what in the world I was doing.

The list of available components is pretty large and it was easy getting distracting looking at all of the examples to see what I could have used but did not for the UI I created, but I found what I need as it is called a HyperlinkButton. I think I am finally getting the hang of this. I then wanted to style the hyperlink as the default color just does not work with my themed colors. I could not find the styles off the main HyperlinkButton class documentation, but I found it right away in Ms. Google as I searched for "hyperlinkbutton styles xaml c#". I define the two brushes and then I run the app expecting easy success. I get the strangest error message I have not seen before:

WinRT information: Failed to create a "Windows.UI.Xaml.Media.Brush" from the text ''. [Line: 185 Position: 46]

I looked in my resources XAML file and then at Git to see what I changed as that just did not make sense. I see the problem immediately as I started adding Foreground color to my Hyperlink button and had Foreground="". Sure enough I look at my MainPage.xaml file and on line 185 I found that half baked code. I compile the code and re-run it and it looks exactly as I intended it to. A little bit more code and I am done with that task.

It is time to do all kinds of manual testing to make sure the latest app is super stable. That is more important to me than adding any new features at this late in the game. I need a really stable app to deliver on Monday morning at my 9am meeting and I cannot work during the weekend, so bug free is  very important.

At the same time I have to find out where the time is being spent processing data from the server as the time spent processing is pretty amazing when load the same data from local files. I must say that over the many years I have been doing this I have not found great benefit in using a performance analyzer as they are not to understand and take time to figure out what is being presented in the output report. I used to run analyzers all of the time in OpenGL development as they helped me. So, I decided to give it a try in VSE. They certainly make it so easy to run as I just select "Performance and Diagnostics" from the DEBUG menu. Download 6 hours worth of data and then stop the app and up comes the report. I really like the presentation as I can click on the column chart or select a region and the details below update to show the "Hot Elements" where most of the time was spent. The first time I selected "XAML UI Responsiveness" but the second time I selected "CPU Sampling". The later one was easy to explain as most of the CPU is spent in the mapping engine. Although those reports looked really good and had great interactivity, they did not help me with my problem at hand at all. And since I like to torture myself, I ran the amusing "Energy Consumption" report as well. The nice donut chart said it all "The session consumed approximately 139.09 mW-h of battery charge in 1.03 min. This rate of usage will drain a fully charged standard battery in approximately 5.23 hrs." - nice. The nice thing about this report is that I see "Wi-Fi Network" in the table with his blue bars of data that represent each of my downloads. I double click on them and I see another set of "Data Transfer" blocks and tool tips that tell me about each one as far as how much data transferred in each request and uploaded data which must be the request and acknowledgement responses. If I use my touch screen then I just tap on one of the blue blocks and the tool tip displays. Very nice - it does help me see one thing - the network is not the problem and the size of data is not a problem either. At least that helps me some. I look back at the donut chart and see that 59% of time was spent in CPU, 40% of the time was spent rendering data to the display and 2% was spent on network traffic. I went back into the "CPU Sampling" report and start poking around to see if any glaring problems came out. Although interesting and good looking, I need to add console log statements in my code and figure out what the delay is between getting the server data and starting the next download as that is my real problem.

In order to find the problem in my code I searched for way to get elapsed time and found the StopWatch class and added a Start/Increment/End calls and reran the app. Loading the data form the server took a total of around 44 seconds but reading the same data from files took a little over 1 second. To read 24 hours worth of data (around 65,000 data points with 18 values per point) took 20 seconds. Then I got brave and went back to loading 24 hours of data from the server and that took 4 minutes. I sent an email to the customer with this information. Now blinding fast but not horrible and the times are predictable and do not really vary much at all.

It took way longer than I expected to get the last issues resolved, but finally I am done and the only thing left to do is to have one final meeting and do the official hand off to the customer, but that is for another day.