I have a very critial business application presently running using Winforms.
The application is a very core UI shell. It accepts input data, calls a webservice on my server to do the computation, displays the results on the winforms app and finally send a print stream to the printer.
Presently the application is deployed using Click-once.
Moving forward, I am trying to contemplate wheather I should move the application into a Silverlight application. Couple of reasons I am thinking silverlight.
Gives clients the feel that it is a cloud based solution.
Can be accessed from any PC. While the clickonce app is able to do this as well, they have to install an app, and when updates are available they have to click "Yes" to update.
The application presently has a drop down list of customers, this list has expanded to over 3000 records. Scrolling through the list is very painful. With Silverlight I am thinking of the auto complete ability.
Out of the browser - this will be handy for those users who use the app daily.
I haven't used Silverlight previous hence looking for some expert advice on a few things:
Printing - does silverlight allow sending raw print data to the printer. The application prints to a Zebra Thermal label printer. I have to send raw bytes to the printer with the commands. Can this be done with SL, or will it always prompt the "Print" dialog?
Out of browser - when SL apps are installed as out of browser, how to updates come through, does the app update automatically or is the user prompted to opt for update?
Printing -- using the PrintDocument API your user will be prompted for a print dialog. Currently using that API there is no way to suppress this. It isn't ideal for high-volume thermal situations (like pharmacies, shipping warehouses, etc.). You could use the trusted application mode and peek out into COM and do whatever you want with the printer.
The update happens when the application asks for it. There is an API to use and, once called, if an update exists it is downloaded -- no prompt to the user as an option. If an update is found you can alert the user to restart or that on the next restart they will have the updated application.
Autocomplete is not something that can only be done in Silverlight. Your ClickOnce app is already out-of-browser. And printing via raw bytes to a thermal printer is something that would not be easily engineered in Silverlight.
Not trying to sound negative, but in sum it sounds like you're better off simply working on enhancing the app that you already have.
Related
I have a simple digital signage solution with a presentation application in WPF. I would like to "monitor" it from my remote machine. I would like to send a stream of the content the application is showing now (images, video, userControls, etc.).
How to do this, do i need to manually take a screenshot and send it in a video stream to my monitor - how to encode it into a stream the monitoring application can playback (that one is also WPF).
Ok, if snapshots are ok then I've done this before. The way I did it was to take a "screenshot" of the app (using code you can find here: http://www.grumpydev.com/2009/01/03/taking-wpf-screenshots/ ) then have the signage app spin up a webservice (HttpListener, WCF or SelfHosted Nancy) that returns the current screen whenever a request is made to a particular url. You monitor app then polls that url however often you need to.
This was done to monitor an interactive game for a Surface device, and didn't seem to cause any perf issues, so should be fine for your needs.
background
I need to be able to display charts that can capture what the user has clicked on. So for a pie chart, if a user clicks on a pie piece, I should be able to capture which piece he selected. Scatter plot should capture what plot, etc. Access-UI can't capture these things, only that a user clicked on the graph. So I need a different solution.
problem
We do not have access to a web server. The front end needs to connect directly with the access database. So what front end solutions can I use that will give me the UI flexibility I need to solve my problem?
possible solutions?
Use silverlight in access (http://desktopweb.blogspot.com/2010/12/using-silverlight-with-access-part-ii.html)
Winforms that connects to Access database via ADO
Is there anything that allows me to use HTML/JS or flash? HTML/JS would be the best solution, followed by flash just due to its wide support. I was researching Web Browser Control but I am not completely clear on whether it is opening local HTML files or browsing through http. I also wasn't clear if it supports JS or can load Flash.
When you first said about the click though capability my first thought was the reporting that is possible using SSRS. The easiest way is to have a reporting server and have the reports available through a browser. However you say you can’t have a web server so I’m guessing that a reporting server is also out.
You could however still use BIDS or report builder to make your reports and then the report viewer control in a flavour of .net to display the reports. Note that you have to convert them to RDLC files and feed the data to them.
That’s my 2p worth, I won’t comment on flash or silverlight as I don’t know enough about them to make an informed recommendation
The web browser control that's usable in Access can use any resource that can be reached via a URL, or you can assign a string of HTML (valid, of course) to it. I forget the exact property you use for the latter, but it's doable (I didn't know this the last time I implemented a web browser control to display HTML from an Access app, so created a temp file, and never went back to replace that with just assigning the HTML directly once I learned how -- so I forgot how, of course!).
I want to have my app which is minimized to capture data selected in another app's window when the hot key is pressed. My app definitely doesn't have the focus. Additionally when the hot key is pressed I want to present a fading popup (Outlook style) so my app never gets focus.
At a minimum I want to capture the Window name, Process ID and the selected data. The app which has focus is not my application?
I know one option is to sniff the Clipboard, but are there any other solutions.
This is to audit the rate of data-entry in to another system of which I have no control. It is a mainframe emulation client program(attachmate aka java-hosted telnet with 3250 support).
The plan is
complete data entry in Application X.
Select a certain section of the screen in App X which is proof of data entry (transaction ID).
Press the Magic Hotkey, which then 'sends' the selection to my App.
From System.environment or system.Threading I can find the Windows logon.
Similiarly I can also capture the time.
All the data will be logged to SQL.
Once Complete show Outlook style pop up saying the data entry has been logged.
Any thoughts.
Hooking the keyboard/mouse & screen scraping is pretty much the limit of what you can do with an applet. Remember Java is compiled to bytecode and run in the JVM. Because of the nature of the JVM, portability, and security concerns, you don't really have access to anything inside of the applet. All you will probably see from .Net is a "SunAwtFrame" classed window with no children.
The focus thing is doable, just use SendMessage (& other) API's to do what you need in the background and as long as you don't change the focus it will remain as is (ie. running code does not require focus)
As far as the data extraction goes, its going to come down to whether or not you can pull that info from the screen using some (potentially hardcore) image processing. Applets are a sort of no-mans land (from within .Net atleast), there is no JavaWindow.Textbox.GetAStringForMePlease().
For the record, there is an exception, if you physically control the applet. In that case you can make a sort of applet shell to hook the guts of the applet.
It sounds like you need to set up a global keyboard hook to capture the hot key this code project article shows how to do that (in C# but it's not much different):
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/globalhook.aspx
And then you could use the FindWindow API to find the other apps window, then find the control that contains the "transaction ID" and use the WM_GETTEXT message to copy the text from it.
I am currently running a SL3 project where we are in a highly iterative development mode with about 25 active test customers. I am making small changes at a clip of about 4 new builds per day. It is important to know this application is mission critical line of business for these 25 people, it is the tool they use all day to do their work so they are using it constantly and often launch their browser and the app in the morning and never close it until the end of the day.
The challenge is that when I make an update to the application I have no clean way to notify the users, in most cases this is ok as it is rare that I introduce a data contract change or something that would be a classic 'breaking' change to the app/service. Users keep plugging along and will get the change next time they refresh.
Right now we have resorted to emailing everyone and telling them to force refresh or close the browser and log back in.
Surely there is a better way...
Right now my train of thought is to have a method on the server that compares client xap versions and determines if the client being used is the most up to date, if so I will notify the user and make them update.
What have you done to solve this problem?
One way of doing it is to use a push mechanism (I used Kaazing Websoocket Gateway but any would do). When a new version of the XAP is released a message (either manually entered into the system by admin or automated triggered by XAP file change event) would be sent to all the clients. In the simplest scenario some notification would be shown to a user (telling him that a new version is released and the application needs to refresh) and then the app would refresh (by simply reloading the page) saving user's state if necessary.
If I would do this I would just keep it simple. A configuration value in web.config and a corresponding service method that simply returns that value (the value itself could be anything, but a counter is probably wise). Then you could have your Silverlight app poll that service method at regular intervals. Whenever the value changes (which you would do manually when you deploy a new version), just pop up a dialog telling the user to refresh the browser or log in/out. This way you don't have to force them to refresh every time. If you go with the idea of comparing xap file versions they will always be required to refresh, even for non-breaking changes.
If you want to take it further you could come up with some sort of mechanism to distinguish between different severity levels. For instance, if the new config value would contain the string "update_forced", you could force the users to reload the app by logging them out automatically (a little harsh, perhaps). If it contains the string "update_recommended", just show a little icon at the top right corner saying that there is a new version and that they should upgrade in their own time.
Granted, this was targeted at Silverlight 3, but with the PollingDuplex client and such in the newer versions of Silverlight, you could publish an "Update Now" bit to the clients, and build a mechanism in the client to alert the user that there is an update that is now out... that they should update it shortly, etc. You may even be able, through serialization and such, to save the state that they are in when they close the app to reload it.
We've done stuff similar with a LOB app that we built, so that as users are changing things, the rest of the userbase sees those changes immediately. Next up will be putting the flags in to change authorization and upgrades "on the fly" if you will.
What are my options for printing in Silverlight 3? Assume I have this awesome Silverlight application/control that creates a graphical display of some data. Now the user wants to print it.
I have considered a few options but I have yet to test any of these. Before I do that I would like to get some feedback on how it can be done.
Use the browser printing capabilites. In my experience this is does not provide a useful print, but perhaps with some interaction between the Silverlight host and the browser it can be done?
Use WriteableBitmap. The image can either be written locally, but this requires interaction from the user, or sent to the server where a suitable file (e.g. PDF file) can be generated and then sent back to the browser. Unfortunately you now get the overhead of sending the image twice across the network and increased complexity on the server side.
Send XAML back to the server that is then rendered in a WPF application running on the server. The result is the sent back to the client. I'm not sure if this is possible at all however, but if it is the network overhead is less than in option 2. Unfortunately, the complexity on the server side is even higher.
Wait for Silverlight 4?
One thing I have considered is that my awesome control probably will have a ScrollViewer at the highest level, but the user will want to print the entire content of the control, not just whatever is visible inside the bounds of the ScrollViewer. How can I handle this added complexity?
In all seriousness, I think your best option is to wait until Silverlight 4 if your client can wait that long. I've seen a good bit of buzz about SL 4 supporting printing on twitter, though it's not official. I'd wait until PDC in a few weeks and see if any Silverlight bits trickle out to support printing.
Take a look at SmartPrint for Silverlight 3: http://www.smartwebcontrols.com/SmartPrintDetails.aspx
TBH I wouldn't use any of those options:-
Printing from the browser. Fine if you are printing say a chart or something else that scales well on a single sheet of paper. Rubbish for anything else especially where you have scrolled content.
WriteableBitmap. I can't see a client-side only solution being acceptable to the user "Please save this and then print it" message. It could be made to work bouncing off the server but would be bad for bandwidth use (bandwidth is import right? because in a well-connect intranet you wouldn't using Silverlight?).
Sending XAML to server for rendering. Really awkward it would be WPF XAML not SL XAML, where and how would you do the binding, why send XAML at all, since the server needs to be pretty much clued in on this so why can't it hold the XAML needed as well. Or were you thinking of sending just pure XAML with all the data needed? Still its a lot of plumbing needed in the SL that isn't actually related to SL.
Use Silverlight 4, its possible that in the not to distant future this would be the correct no-brainer choice (personally I wouldn't hold my breath) but right now SL4 doesn't exist.
A 5th option
Place report generating code on the server and have the Silverlight app inform the server of the data set required (not necessarily posting the data merely the criteria needed to access the correct set). In my experience direct prints of GUIs aren't particularly satisfactory when the user really needs a good printed form of the data.
Its true that at times the user just wants to quickly get some offline access to a grid of data as it looks there and then. In that situation users often find an export to spreadsheet compatible file preferable to printing, which would be possible from SL.
Something akin to number two is pretty much your best bet and is what I've seen done for printing in most Silverlight apps so far.
You can have the app send content for printing back to the web server (i.e. a new handler or query string parameters to a printing page) and pop up another page for the user to print web content from, or you could allow the user to download a file and have them print that.
Sliverlight 3 does not support printing.
If you can wait for silverlight 4, they have given it "high priority"
If not use Writeablebitmap: http://www.andybeaulieu.com/Home/tabid/67/EntryID/161/Default.aspx