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haraldMember

Posted: August 16, 2012 7:00 PM

Hi guys,

I'm about to make a decision for our team to either continue with Intersoft UI or drop it altogether.

My doubts mostly arise from imo questionable design decisions, but I want to give you the opportunity to comment on it and possibly change my mind. I have just recently joined the team and the decision for Intersoft UI was made by me predecessor and none of my team members (who are quite capable and have worked with your UI for several months) have satisfying answers for my questions (I am new to your UI - I have worked with it for just about 6 weeks). I am a seasoned software designer (30+ years experience) and I am seeing things that really raise my alarm bells.

Here are my issues:

1. Try to right-click into any of your grids. The entire app stops responding. Every single time.

2. Using your grid we are waiting for doule-clicks to then spawn a dialog to change the entity that was double-clicked on. The dialog comes up but always BEHIND the window containing the grid. You clearly don't handle the double-click properly. I know of the pit-falls involved in implementing a proper double-click handler as I did it myself for a button. It was not exactly trivial. What happened in my case (before I fixed it) was the same I am seeing with your grid: The second click is still passed on as a single click. Sure, you intercept it in some fassion to get the timing for the double-click event, but it is passed on as a single click nonetheless. And it is that second click that restores the focus to the grid, thereby preventing the just spawned dialog from receiving focus.

3. IWindow. This is a really bad one. What's up with that? Why not derive from a proper WPF window? It's behind your super-thin wrapper anyways, isn't it? If IWindow is REALLY necessary why not expose more (as in MOST) Window funtionality? Try spawning a UXDialogBox from another one. It appears in some arbitrary position and there is little I can do about it. I tried to just set Left and Top to 0 after showing it. It does appear at 0,0 but it doesn't handle mouse events properly any longer. We found a trick to have at least some semble of control but it is very messy. Had you properly exposed the underlying Window functionality (like WindowsStartupLocation just as an example) you'd make the developer's life a lot easier.

I have a lot more issues, but let's just leave it at that for now.

Please explain your decisions in detail and maybe restore my confidence in your product.

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Jimmy PetrusAdministrator

Posted: August 23, 2012 7:07 AM in response to harald

Dear Harald,

Thanks for posting your questions in our community forum.

I'll specifically address your concerns about the 2nd and 3rd point.

For point 2), apparently it's not the issue in Grid nor the double-click implementation. The actual issue is that the dialog box doesn't recognize the 2nd window as a valid root visual, thus it displays the dialog in the first (main) window. This is an issue and will be addressed in our upcoming builds.

Also, since you didn't give detailed information about the platform and controls that you're using, I'm assuming that both points are specific to WPF platform, and that the dialog you mentioned is a UXDialogBox, not WPF's native dialog box.

For point 3), please keep in mind that UXWindow and UXDialogBox are framework elements, they are not native WPF windows. The IWindow is introduced for cross-platform support (Silverlight + WPF) and is a core infrastructure for our windowing framework. Our windowing controls are designed to provide a number of rich capabilities not available in standard WPF windows such as desktop-style MDI windows, integration with application launcher control (Dock-style taskbar), and more. You can find out the complete information about our windowing architecture here: http://www.intersoftpt.com/Support/ClientUI/Docs/WindowOverview.html

Now it's clear that our windowing controls aren't WPF windows, you need to consider which windowing control that suit your applications. The simple rule of thumb is that, if you want to display a child window within your window, then choose UXDialogBox. Otherwise, you can just use WPF's native Window and show it as modal. Of course, in this case, you'll see a separate window out of the current window.

In addition to the element-based window controls, we actually had real WPF windows. The first is called UXGlassWindow, allowing you to create modern window with glass visual effect. And the second is UXRibbonWindow which you can use to host a ribbon control in a transparent window that simulates the appearance of Office 2010. Everything is written in our comprehensive documentation if you want to learn further.

Last but not least, the UXWindow/UXDialogBox controls did have WindowStartupLocation property. Simply set it to CenterScreen will make your window/dialog appears in the center. If that doesn't work, then I'll need to ask for the version and build number you're using.

Please feel free to submit the other issues you found. We'll be happy to review if they are really issues, or there are something we can assist.

Best,
Jimmy

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Handy SuryaSupport

Posted: August 21, 2012 3:42 AM in response to harald

~~Hello,~~

Thank you for your valuable feedback. I will forward it to our dveloper teams. Fyi, for the future, we will change the trial box design with vs2012 using metro style. This dialog box will use wpf control. However, this style can only be used inside Vs2012.

~~Regards,~~

~~Handy~~

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haraldMember

Posted: August 22, 2012 11:19 PM in response to Handy Surya

Well, you clearly don't care about customer feedback.

Had I received such feedback about my API my pride alone would dictate me to respond, unless of course I knew that my design is highly flawed. I take your week long silence as confirmation for my suspicions.

Intersoft is now in our trashcan. And it will not be resurrected. Not on my watch.

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Handy SuryaSupport

Posted: August 23, 2012 12:23 AM in response to harald

Hello Harald,

We are sorry if we were late to give you our respond. We just have our Independence day and mubarak national holiday (17 August - 21 August). We apologized for the trouble. But we will have your feedback to our developer teams.

Regards,
Handy

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