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GUI Development considerations...

Started by Toolmaker Sep 2, 2008 at 9:04 AM 2 replies 1k views

Original Post

Sep 2, 2008 at 9:04 AM

I've been asked by someone from my debating society to write a program which can be used at tournaments to rank the contestants and decide who will debate against who during the next round. But, since this will be a piece of software I'll write for free(I'm a freelancer/consultant). I want to use the software as showcase piece and therefor want to make the UI as up-to-date as possible. However, I've been out of touch with recent User Interface development standards. Anyone have ideas? The application itself will consist of several parts: - Team registration(<- from XLS) - Judge registration(<- from XLS) - Room registration(Which room people debate in) - Round setup(Which team debates against who) - Score entry - Result output(-> into XLS or PPT) So, this will be around 6 or 7 screens(forms) I have to make. I considered a web approach, but the chances that there will be no internet connection present during tournaments. So, I considered a normal MDI approach, but I'm not sure if that's the best way to go. And, I wonder how I should handle the menu in that case(I could go with the menu bar that Outlook 2003 has on the left side, with the calender, inbox, etc. but I have no idea where to get such a control from for free). Any ideas / tips here? Toolmaker

Toolmaker

Sep 3, 2008 at 4:30 AM

Hmm, no responses? O_O

anda

Sep 3, 2008 at 7:45 AM

I dunno about MDI, but web apps are always easy to develop, I remember there being some software that you can use to make webpages run like normal applications which might look nice.

edit.
I might be called Google Gears, I forget though.

Nik02

Sep 3, 2008 at 9:05 AM

If this is for Windows, WPF is a very good choice as an UI library. It is easy to construct an Outlook-style side menu from a StackPanel, a built-in control that supports full templating of both itself and its contents.

WPF has a very powerful context-based data binding system built in, so you need to write minimal amount of code for retrieval, view, modify and storage of your data; data that can come from almost any object (such as an ordinary .net array/list or a data table connected to a dbms).

The back-end code for WPF is standard .net stuff, so it is not difficult to integrate with custom code.

Visual Studio 2008 support for WPF is very good even in Express editions, if you don't have it yet. Expression Blend, on the other hand, is an artist-oriented tool for WPF and is more useful than VS if you want to "skin" your controls in a graphics-driven workflow.

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