Month: May 2014

What to use for Desktop Development…

Line of business application development isn’t going away. How you look at current enterprise development requirements and future needs may indicate a code base strategy that follows very closely inline with XAML. Windows Presentation Foundation – WPF – has become a default for Windows desktop development and as Microsoft infuses new feature support into the IDE, including greater compatibility across Visual Studio assets, the underlying structure – XAML, helps solidify a path going forward.

From strong graphical solutions expected by line of business application users built on WPF to mobile fluent front-line workers consuming a mix of WPF, Silverlight and others, WPF answers an immediate need for business systems while incurring a knowledge base that carries forward to Silverlight and mobile app development spurred on with Xamarin.

Enterprise resource planning and scheduling starts with the heavy lifting being done on the desktop, where the detail and calculation intensive work is efficiently maneuvered using multiple displays that present multiple views of enterprise data. When it comes to desktop and more mobile Enterprise Resource Planning and Scheduling needs – DBI has you covered.

This month, we’re pleased to be releasing DBI Calendar WPF version 2.0!

In the segments that follow we will introduce the significant changes that have been made to Calendar WPF and the new features including full MVVM support that you have all been asking for – enjoy!

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What’s Your Flavour of Scheduling ?

Scheduling has many names and terms of reference; often having starting points with Calendars and date pickers and quickly advancing to Day Minders, Rosters, Appointment scheduling to Enterprise Resource Planning and production scheduling.

Each has its own characteristics for presenting a type of appointment, task … in general terms a commitment that has a specific start time and an end time and usually presented along a timescale. The orientation of the timescale will imply a type of scheduling  – for instance, a vertical timescale is often viewed as appointment scheduling similar to a day timer or Outlook style of scheduling. In contrast, a horizontal timescale will imply resource planning, project management or resource scheduling. 

The complexities of scheduling have not diminished – if at all, scheduling has become even more complicated as we account for organizations with operations around the world accommodating a more sophisticated work force and advanced customer.

Taking these aspects in account, DBI has evolved its core set of components allowing developers to effectively manage the global nature of business and life today including the growing complexities of scheduling.  To the point, where today we look at managing many to many relationships that are associated with arranging appointments with resources from around the world.  A good example might be a video conference call, where resources from around the world are scheduled.