To help me I came across a website called Pearltrees. This website site helps me to organise the sites that I visit or want to reference and to share these with others or just use it myself as a mobile bookmarks.

Here’s the link to my Pearltree for the manufactures websites.

BTW: development has been slowed down for the time being as Christmas is coming.

Have a Happy Christmas and safe New Year – keep on modelling.

The new version will have the same features and functions as the current version of Modellers Assistant. That is the lists (project, stock and shopping lists). You can view all the items from a manufacturer. You can associate PDF documents to a project or manage them as a collection. You can create and manage a Project of Projects to help break down large projects into smaller ones. You can create collections of Internet sites and associate them to a project or manage them in a collection.

So what of the new version? Well for starters the new version has a redeveloped interface. The use of the right mouse button and context menus for a control has been removed in favour of visual controls in the window. Whilst context menus are a great tool for removing clutter in the window it does not become obvious to the user what to do.

The new interface is developed in XAML or WPF which has been a steep learning curve from windows forms but the customisation that can be done is incredible. In future posts I shall be showing some screen shots so you can see what the new interface and features look like.

The base functionality of Modellers Assistant has been completed. The new interface is a custom tab control with tabs for the lists and toolbox items. These are linked to menu items for the same. Tabs can be opened from the menu item. Tabs can be closed either from the menu item or from the tab header.

The window has been enlarged to take advantage of newer screen sizes and giving more real estate space for controls. However, the window is now resizeable and scrollable to cater for smaller screen sizes down to about 1024 x 768. Does anyone really use a screen size of 800 x 600 or 640 x 480 any more?

The core functionality for the Project and Stock lists has been completed. Projects can be created and renamed. Projects can be opened and items selected in a project. The Stock list is opened and items are selectable. Manufacturers libraries can be opened and items selected. At present items cannot be added to or removed from the lists.

Four toolbox items have been written but the layouts need to be cleaned up. These are Manufacturers Libraries, Item Compare, Scale Calculator, and Web Links.

Manufacturers Libraries – this displays the items for a manufacturer.

Item Compare – allows for side by side comparison of items from either the same or different manufacturers.

Scale Calculator – well 3 calculators actually; a scale calculator (real size to scale and visa-versa), a scale converter (size from one scale to another scale), a percentage converter (percentage to convert between scales).

Web Links – manages and associates lists of websites.

That’s about it for now. As more developments happen and features become reality then I shall add posts here.

A new version of Modellers Assistant is in development. More details on this will be in the next post.

The databases for the new version is being updated with new features and of course more data.

The old version of Modellers Assistant is no longer going to be developed though it will still be supported.

The databases for the old version of Modellers Assistant will no longer be updated BUT when the new version of Modellers Assistant is available the new data will be retro fitted to the old databases (minus the new features) and be made available.

Whilst this may not be suitable for everyone I feel it is the best path.

Now my family and living conditions are starting to improve though how long for nobody knows as the country is heading for recession again.

Again sorry for the lack of information or updates.

Firstly my laptop got trashed when my step daughter poured a glass of coke over it. The laptop is my work environment for development and updates, whilst I have a backup of the data and source code it was more the fact that it is my office. And there it was gone in a second. Anyway after much haggling the insurance company refused to replace it and so I was without a laptop until the end of March.

Secondly we’ve had a cancer scare in the family and that really made us think and take stock of our lifestyle. Luckly the all clear has been given but there is still a risk which means some drastic changes to make sure that the all clear stays just that.

Thirdly we’ve decided to start a new business which meant a lot of time ane effort in preparing the paperwork, looking to rasie capital, get the company up and running and then start producing the goods. This is still ongoing but this has taken much of my time over the past couple of months. Hopefully when things start to calm down I can get back to some development.

I’ve had to shut down the forum as some spammers have hijacked it and are running mail bombs. I won’t be bringing it back but I will be changing the website shortly to remove the forum link and add a replacement page for information that would have been placed on the forum.

On the development front I am midway to implementing a new tab page for the program. The tab page combines the Kits ‘n Bits information with the Colours information and provides a common interface. The bottom tab on the Project, Stock List, and Shopping List tabs have been replaced with just information for the selected item from the list. Also a sort feature is being added to enable the data to be sorted in a natural order in all the lists. This means a change to the data tables. Impementing these changes will take a little while longer due to the startup of the new business.

Some new manufacturers have been added to the database. Whilst I would like to have added more manufacturers time has been against me and so I shall have to make do for the present.

In light of the start of the year Modellers Assistant has suffered but once the business is running and I can get some time back then I should start to make some progress. As the business is taking a lot of my time at the moment I don’t know when that will be for now. I shall try to keep things ticking over until more time allows me to make some real progress.

That’s all for now.

The total amount of data in Modellers Assistant has nearly doubled in the past year, but the number of after sales and kits items has trebled. There are still nearly 750 more manufacturers to be sourced and added to the database so there is still a long way to go with the data.

On the program side there has been little in the way of development except for changing the code to handle international installations. In the last update a small feature was added to allow for quicker access to the paint equivelants data.

Hopefully in the next year some of the other features that I want to add into to the program will get there and of course the data will continue to expand.

Sales have slowed down in the past couple of months and this I can only attribute to the global recession as there still appears to be plenty of interest in the website with a number of downloads of the demo version.

Now I’m going to take a break during December to get my head aroud Christmas and to develop some little utilities to help make the data entry quicker.

The problem is because Crystal Reports obtains the data for the report directly from a database then you can’t intercept the data and change the number or date format before it hits the report. You can define the report to have a specific number or data format but then you would have to have several reports to support different local cultures.

The work around that I came up with was to read the data from the database into an ADO dataset/datatable and then make the required changes as defined by the local culture. The write the data to another datatable and pass that to Crystal Reports. It works but why should I have to spend additional CPU cycles and memory for what could have been done in Crystal Reports? why can’t I pass a parameter to Crystal Reports to use a certain culture to format the report?

May it’s a different story with the full Crystal Reports and is just a limitation of the embedded version.

Now I’m back to doing some data updates for the program before getting back to some development work.

So off I went and set up a system in Norwegian and sure enough Modellers Assistant failed. The root of the problem was the decimal point character. I done some more testing and basically there are two decimal point characters used around the world either a period (.) or a comma (,). However the thousand separator can be a number of characters – period (.), comma (,), space ( ), and apostrophy (‘).

How to tackle the problem was another issue. There are a number of approaches of which the most obvious one was to decode the number into a string and determine what characters are used and then translate it but that approach is not easy or reliable. The simpliest solution was to use the globalization namespace to determine the culture being used on the PC and then run the program as an invariant culture (netural) and then only use the local culture when displaying data or retrieving data input.

The change to handle the local culture is not particularly difficult but does involve going through all the controls that display or retrieve data and then change the code to handle the culture. This created what could be perceived as a culture layer on top of the program. Underneath it the programs logic has little change until I realised that I had handled a large amount of numeric data as a string. So I have to change the variables to numeric. Thankfully refactoring makes an easy job of the changes. I’m still going through the program making changes but it does make you think about how the global market needs to be considered even for the smallest of programs.

The internet has broken down the barriers of global marketing and it was presumptious of me to assume that Modellers Assistant would work anywhere in the world. Well it would if the PC was installed as an English language. If I had thought about this at the design phase then things would have been easier, especially as I want to add a calander function to the program at some point and that would have really caused issues in the global market.

Though I have made the changes to the numeric format there are other areas that could be handled such as right to left writting and the bigger issue of translation into other languages. The latter is probably what most of use think about having an international product but it can be something more simple as a decimal point character.

In an effort to combate the cost of living we have just about given up shopping in supermarkets. So I’ve been busy building a poly tunnel to grow vegetables just about all year round and I’m currently extending the vegetable patch for next year to grow more vegetables. Also planned is a fruit area for the garden to grow more fruit  and we also want to get some chickens for some fresh eggs.

In the kitchen we’re making our own bread, butter, jams, preserves, and sauces. Any additional fruit, veg, meat, and fish is sourced from local farm shops, fishmongers, and butchers. The difference in the quality and taste of the food in comparison to supermarket produce is amazing. For example, cauliflower from a supermarket had no taste to it – from the farm shop it is really tasty and cruchy. My advice to anyone is try non-supermarket food for a week and see for yourselves. If you thinks it is better then grow it your self and get the cost down. You’ll feel better for the exercise and you know how your food is sourced.

After all that activity we took a short break to Legoland and it is an amazing place. We all enjoyed it despite the weather. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Anyway back to the programming. Development of the image album is coming on nicely. A custom control needed to be created for the thumbnails. This is based upon a listview and works a treat. I’m currently in the middle of developing the cataloging side of the albums so multiple albums can be created and managed. Once that is done then the Albums can be associated to projects.

I’ve been investigating the physical packaging for Modellers Assistant. Currently I’m using inkjet printable CDs and a CD cover all printed on a HP printer. Whilst the result is passable it is not of a top quality. I can’t afford to go to an external printers at the moment so I’ve invested in a colour laser printer and lightscribe DVD writer. The CD looks better done in lightscribe all be it in monochrome. The CD cover does look a little more professional on a colour laser. I’m now looking to develop the packaging as a DVD case rather than a jewel case. So I’m also looking to produce a quick start guide for the DVD case. Whilst writting the guide I noticed a few problems with Modellers Assistant which I’ve had to fix quickly. Hopfully the current users of Modellers Assistant will not come across the problems until the current development phase has finished as I can then rollout the fixes and new features in one go.

I recently ran some advertising in Modelling magazines and the adverts have given a small boost to the sales, which is steadily growing. I have the suspision that the additonal cost of living that people are having to pay out for has impacted my sales. Hopefully I can rough it out until the economy starts to improve.

That’s all for now. Back to the gardening and programming and I’ll give another update when I can.

I took a break from the development last week because the schools were on holiday from half term and trying to concentrate on programming with the noise in the background is difficult. I took the opportunity to start developing a modelling website for the projects that I’m building. As yet I haven’t made much progress other than creating a shell for the website. More details to come.

This week I started to get back to development as the schools have gone back. Before I got too into the programming I started to ponder the future of my program. Modellers Assistant is written in C# and uses the .NET Framework 2.0. Microsoft have .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 out aswell and I began to wonder whether to upgrade to 3.5. The problem is that I don’t want to be always updating my program to a later framework as it can become a problem for owners of a prior version of Modellers Assistant to upgrade the framework every year and I can’t maintain different versions of Modellers Assistant depending upon different versions of the framework.

This led me to think about whether I need the framework at all. In short the answer is no. Why? Because Modellers Assistant uses an Access database for the data. This is referenced via MDAC and the framework. If I use C# I have to use the framework and MDAC. If I was to use C++ and MFC then I only need MDAC. This reduces the runtime requirement of my program. The big problem is redeveloping from C# to C++. Some of the controls that I use in C# (i.e. datagrids) are just not available in MFC. This means either using a 3rd party control or developing one myself.

The philosophy I adopted when starting out with Modellers Assistant was to use (as far as possible) native controls and not 3rd party or user controls. Therefor I’ve had to investigate some alternatives. I’ve used Visual Studio for my development and this has served me well. I’m currently looking at Codegear (Borland) C++ Builder as this has the controls I need (all be it Delhi controls with a wrapper to allow C++ to use them).

So now comes the crunch – redevelop now to C++ or later. Given that I am in the middle of developing new features it makes sense to continue with that in C#. When that section of work is finished split my time between updating the data and redeveloping into C++. In truth I wanted to have Modellers Assistant a native Windows app from the start but C# gave me a quicker development cycle and with access to the Access database it was very straight forward. I do like C# but I do wish it wasn’t tied so closely to the .NET Framework and allowed for a native Windows application, such as MFC does.