Shubho's Blog

Have you ever seen how boardrooom connections page of WotNews, Australia ( http://wotnews.com.au/boardroom_connections/ ) works? Few days back, I was working on a similar requirement where we had Silverlight 3/4 to implement the same feature. While searching for Silverlight feature to implement this, we discovered Graphite (a product from Orbifold ) which could give similar features as required. If you are new to Graphite then for you, Graphite is a diagramming control with a (auto-layout) spring-embedder algorithm for Silverlight. The control is designed to display a small set of data without having to define a particular layout or without much customization. The Silverlight version of it can be used for website navigation, inside SharePoint, to visualize CRM/Dynamics relationships etc. Conceptually, Graphite control works managing components at 2 levels - one at Visual level and another at Non-Visual level. Visual level ensures creation and maintenance of visual parts (node, conne...

I would like to share a problem that I faced while installing Visual Studio 2010 Express editions using Web Platform Installer 2.0 version. Web Platform Installer 2.0 from Microsoft is a very good tool for keeping track of what is installed and what is not and to install softwares in the background without expecting any user action but I did not like one thing in the Installer i.e. no status of Installation Progress is shown on the installation window. We won't even know if it is actually installing or has died. As the download and the installation take a long time, sometimes I feel that it is not working and try to kill the Platform Installer application. Later on, I realize that to find whether it is really doing anything or not, the best way to check the progress would be to check the installation log files. The installation log files are created in the system Temp folder. To browse the Temp folder, please browse the C:\Users\ \AppData\Local\Temp folder directly (in Windows Vi...

Have you ever faced any problem with your UI based application when you are making a long database operation or calling a long running service or making any network connections like connecting your CD drive etc.? I think, your answer to this would be “Yes” whereas you would have wanted your UI application to continue to respond to your actions while the above like operations going in the background, and to display the results on the UI as soon the background operations are completed. I would like to have this, wouldn’t you? The simple answer to this is to create a multi-threaded application and have different threads to manage different operations. People like to use the word “multithreading” when they talk in the context of software programming but it is not a simple task to write multithreaded programs. It can make the entire application down and can take weeks to find and fix the problem. Any application (to avoid any argument for now, I would say Win UI application) by default runs...