At TechEd Europe and TechEd South Africa I talked a little about WPF and the Expression Suite of tools.  I mentioned that in future we would be working more closely with Designers.

I remember my first Windows app back in well 1989.  It was an email application written for a Telecom Company in Philadelphia.  The purpose of the app was to demonstrate the power of these new machines called PCs and to get sponsorship from the company CEOs to build more PC based applications.  For a small app it was therefore pretty important.  It is interesting in hindsight that a techie geek like me with an astrophysics background would be designing the UI for this proof of concept.   I had worked with some UI experts in Plessey in the UK -  they called themselves Cognitive Ergononmists.  So I had some how to make a UI functional and given the very limited pallet available for the early Windows developers I was able to make a reasonable stab at the UI.

Now however the world is very different.  The Web has raised expectations of the graphical content of an application.  The new GPU cards have given us a much richer pallet of colours and controls to work with and now with WPF we can build more powerful, stylish and appealing apps.

So let’s build a WPF application!  Perhaps the experience will turn me into a Designer.  But just in case I need some advice I will talk to a graphics artist mate of mine Tony. 

The application.

Back in 1998 while working with Microsoft Consulting Services in Boston I did a multi month gig with a company building a Hotel management application.  I don’t think they every shipped the app (they certainly never paid my consulting bill), but I will use this idea as a proof of concept.

We need to manage the reservations, check-in, check-out processes, room cleaning and billing.  We need a graphical representation of the hotel and its rooms so we can have a different graphic per hotel but the body of the application will stay the same.  It would also be nice to make this a modular design so we can use it for anything that associates a person with a resource so we can extend it to airplane reservations, hospitals or even prisons.  So our proof of concept looks like this.

Reservations – customers reserve rooms with a credit card.

Checkin – customers are assigned to a room, credit cards are validated.

Every Morning – rooms are cleaned.

Afternoon – rooms have a turn down service.

Checkout – customer is billed.

The UI needs to show which rooms are occupied, and for any given date which rooms are reserved.  We also need to see when rooms are cleaned and ready for occupation.

That’s it for now but we will keep in the great tradition of ‘scope creep’ and add things that we think are cool or challenging.  My purpose here is to understand and learn about the new interface between our designer friends and us developers and to learn about the new Expression Designer tools.

So my next step is to open the shrink wrap on the Expression Suite.

More later....