Programming in Xailer... without any idea at all

Some days ago, I was talking with Ignacio Ortiz de Zuñiga about Xailer development as a product and the comments in the news gorups, and we both noticed one thing: Xailer is being used with pretty much success by programmers that don't have any idea or have very little experience in Xbase programming, most of them with no idea at all of object oriented programming.

I've been in touch with 3 of theses cases, the first is a Spanish friend of mine, good Paco Viruete, he had developed some applications in Xailer for the RENFE (the spanish trains company), with very little or not effort at all. Congrats Paco !

The second case is closer to me, another good friend, and coleague Pepe Lutrillo, we meet each other more than 10 years ago, in those good Clipper for DOS times.

Pepe left the programming stuff for a very long time, he moved into another IT branch, not exactly programming, but he is a very skillful Clipperhead, and some time ago he decided to come back to the programmer's world and created Gal4Win, an accounting program for Art Galleries, fully created with Xailer:

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I have already meet the third, and most notorious case, from my point of view. This week I've been working in the city of Satillo, in the mexican state of Coahuila, giving a Database Design Introducction Seminar for the Health and Sanity Departament of the State Goverment , invited by my friend Oscar de la Peña, and by the way, I went to visit my coleagues of APSI (www.apsi.com.mx), they developed the best payroll software for Mexico, and there I meet Margarita.

Margarita es the new programmer in APSI, a great cotratation of Armando Garcia, the owner of the company, who has a very good eye to choose his employees.

These last 5 evenings I've been working with Cinthya and Margarita, who comes from the Visual Basic world, so, she knows the way to the Windows programming, she always had used an IDE, and she had always handled data with SQL and she had never "used" a DBF file, doesn't know a thing of CDX or code blocks, however, she had created a Xailer Program.... in less than 8 weeks !!!!!

The brand new product of the APSI family, created by Cinthya and Margarita is named APSI-Capa, and was developed to manage all the training courses given to the employees of a company, it's fully written in Xailer, using Microsoft SQL Server, and all the reports are developed using Crystal Reports.

Data handling is made with DataSets and DataControls, (in fact, Margarita doesn't know that there's a DBF behind de scene), the user inteface along with the reports are pretty well designed.

Here some images, say more than 1000 worlds.

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Belive it or not, this software was created in less than 2 months and it's fully functional, one thing I've noticed, is that people that don't have the influence of other Xbase programming, gets addapted faster to the Xailer's way of work, however, I had also noticed that FiveWin programmers take more time to get adapted to Xailer because the have to change the way of thinking, they try to solve the problems in the old way, without notice that Xailer has a lot of tools to do the same things in an easier way.

Definitly, it looks that Xailer can become in a great programming tool not only for the Clipper or Xbase programmer, but all the others having experience in other IDE based programming tools, without having any idea of Xbase.

Windows Vista, new guidelines for the user interface

Today I was making my weekly blogs review, and I found an article in Ave Mundi, that took me through a comment by Manu Calero, to the MSDN home page, and I found an article that sets the new guidelines to follow to be coherent with the new Windows Vista interface.

Here the link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/UxGuide/UXGuide/Principles/TopViolations/TopViolations.asp

More than a "guide" itself, this page shows things you have to avoid when you are writing a program to be ran under Windows Vista.

The first suggestion of MSDN is to read this article: Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience there you will find 12 simple rules about how to create a user interface in a compatible way with Windows Vista.

After reading this article, we can go to the "Controls" section, here we'll find which are new controls for Windows Vista, and how we should show these controls to the user, the "old" controls are also included in this review.

This guide also has a Text section, this section explains the way we should give instructions to the user in the screen, and the "tone" we should use in our text in order to make them more comprehensive to the final user.

This full featured guide offers also topic related to Windows and Dialogs design, error and warning messages, and also about the use of icons and images.

It really worth the time to give a look to it in order to be prepare in the way we should be programming in a very near future, Windows Vista will be hitting the road in a very short time.