dev in the making

A couple of update’s:

If you’re interested in our little Silverlight project called disi.hr, you can check out the latest build at http://disi.fogi.com.hr/. Beware, it’s Croatian.

Second stage Web Startup Contest deadlines were 3.5.2009, and we had to post links to working prototypes, a “features” document and our source code.
If anyone’s interested the above-mentioned are:

• Prototype: http://disi.fogi.com.hr/
• Features: http://disi.fogi.com.hr/docs/features.html
• Source: disi.codeplex.com

A little babbling about the code now… It’s not exactly a role model for OOP design, some of it was seriously hacked using reflection, mostly because my lack of Silverlight experience and understanding. But hey, it’s a contest geared towards education and this is what I’m doing… Educating myself. I’m gonna list and comment a couple of serious party breakers I encountered:

History
If you thought you could use the browsers back and forward buttons for navigation, you weren’t thinking hard enough. I know I wasn’t.
You have two options. a) hook it up using javascript to the browsers functions and b) develop your own history system. I used the latter and that’s when I had to use reflection due to a seriously lacking model I made. The point: Don’t code empty-minded. Have a VERY GOOD plan. Or you shall regret it.

Setting up the web service
I’ve spent two days figuring out that dreaded web.config and bindings. The point: Customer support should be high up when considering a server.

Asynchronous web service calls
You make a couple of async calls to the web service, hooking events on their completion. You also hook a special method on the last one that you called, which fires an event telling I’m done fetching data. Eeeek! Wrong. Things don’t necessary end in the order you called them. You have to queue them on the completed event of the previously completed call. And that’s quite a lot of lambda expressions or use of reflection even. The point: More isn’t always better. The simplicity of PHP has it’s charms too.