Our client and of course my Twitter followers got a couple of updates during our first implementation of a real world MS Surface application. But I thought it would be nice to summarize my experiences.
Sorry about the quality of the videos: I will buy a more professional camera in due course.
The final product …
As said before a couple of times already: Microsoft deserve a big compliment for the software (and hardware) they delivered. It is so comfortable developing for the MS Surface unit if you have any experience in C# and Visual Studio. Even though I didn’t have any experience in WPF (which would have made it even easier) I was able to take off quite quickly and within matters of hours come up with the first working prototype of the application.
The application itself isn’t that hard or special. It presents product information, triggered by a couple of tags which are glued to the back of the business cards of the sales persons.
In this project we didn’t do the visual elements, but left that up to out partner’s visual designers. That kept me worried for a bit, because I know from experience that integrating visual designs sometimes can be a pain. Not this time though; the VDs of Heuvelman (the partner) did an excellent job and it must be said: everything fitted the first time.
During the development I had to take a couple of hurdles. First, I had to get acquainted with WPF and XAML. Since this was my first WPF program, all of that was a first. I did some experimenting some time ago, but working on a real project is a different cookie as we say in Dutch. But, I got the hang of it quite soon and information on http://www.stackoverflow.com came to the rescue more than once.
Also, the Surface Community site came to the rescue on a couple of occasions. And even though that site isn’t the best Microsoft ever created (to be very mild), the information on it helped on a number of occasions.
But the best part of this project was actually delivering the project and seeing it in action on Event 2009. The salespersons were going berserk seeing the end result and were full of adrenaline to start using the unit and software. I think a lot of sales deals will be done at the Heuvelman stand :-)
It was great fun working on this project, but the working schedule (14 continuous days of working from 8am until 12pm or even later) almost did me. Next project will have a much more healthy schedule.
I’ll keep you posted about next projects. If you want to look at all the stages of the project you can always check out Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/brooz2001.
Bye,
Bart
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