Martin Grayson: Adventures of a 'Devigner' : Applications

Silverlight 2 RTW, the Patient Journey Demonstrator and Blacklight

Martin Grayson — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:20:00 GMT

What a week! Silverlight 2 is here - horray! This release really feels like it has come out of nowhere.

First up - where to get the stuff...

Uninstall the old Silverlight runtimes, Silverlight tools for VS, Silverlight SDK and Blend 2 (any CTP).
Get VS2008 SP1 installed, if you havent already, from here... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/vstudio/cc533448.aspx
Install the Silverlight 2 tools chainer from here... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=c22d6a7b-546f-4407-8ef6-d60c8ee221ed&displaylang=en. This will install the RTW runtime, tools for VS and the Silverlight 2 SDK. It actually says RC1 on the page, but this is definately the RTW runtime.
Install Blend 2 from here... http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Overview.aspx?key=blend
Install the Blend 2 SP1 update from here... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EB9B5C48-BA2B-4C39-A1C3-135C60BBBE66&displaylang=en... and you are good to go!

I have been pretty busy over the last couple of weeks getting my 2 current project up to speed with RTW, and they are now available.

The Patient Journey Demonstrator has now been upgraded to Silverlight 2 RTW...

The current release of Blacklight (v0.1) has also been updated along with the showcase. There is also now a pre-release showcase, giving you a taste for what is coming at the end of October! Check-it out now...

Finally, my UX buddy, Dave Crawford, has updated his Glossy Control styles for the RTW of Silverlight 2. The are real nice, and now, everyone, demand more from Dave!!! See them running live here...

New Patient Journey Demonstrator at MSCUI.net

Martin Grayson — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:12:00 GMT

Hi all - great news, an updated version of the Patient Journey Demonstrator, the project I am currently working on, has been released. Check it out at http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator.

In this release we fixed lots of bugs, as well as added some new features around capturing input from the user. Below is a list of some of the new features and a video walkthrough of the whole demonstrator...

Presence Indicators

Presence and availability is a really important theme in health care. Everywhere where we display an employee’s name, we show their presence...

Updated Navigation Bar

The updated navigation bar allows you to move backwards and forwards through different demonstrators too.

Silverlight Patient Banner

We have incorporated the new Silverlight patient banner, from the Microsoft Health CUI controls library.

Menu Pearl

We have a new menu pearl that will allow you access to some of the new features within the demonstrator - in this release, the ability to add a consultation!

Creating a Consultation

In the primary care demonstrator, you can now create a new consultation, prescribe medications and record observations. You can then save this to the patient record and see the activity list and meds list update!

SNOMED Terminology Lookup

We have taken a subset of the SNOMED database of clinical terms, and made these searchable when creating a consultation. Try typing ‘Chest Pain’.

Search and Prescribe Medications

Search for medications and prescribe to see the meds list view update.

Styled Meds List View

We have styled the Microsoft Health CUI Meds List View control to fit in visually with the demonstrator.

Drug details on Patient Chart’s table view

We have added columns to the table view in Patient Charts for showing the drugs the patient is taking.

Visual Makeover of the ECG charts

We are looking at different ways of representing the deep zoom, digital ECG data (in the Secondary Care Demonstrator). One of those explorations was to make the full result set look more like the live ECG. This is an easter egg, and requires you to press F8 once, as soon as the Secondary Care Demonstrator has loaded!

Annotating the Angiogram

We have added a bunch of features that allow you to annotate the ECG video in the secondary care demonstrator...

Including a tool bar for measuring, inking, drawing marquees, zooming in and going full screen...

A collapsible list of the annotation history...

The ability to attach a text note to each annotation...

A frame by frame selector allowing you to see what annotations are already on the video and provide navigation to those frames...

Walkthrough Video

Check out the video below for a complete walkthrough of the demonstrator - or better still - check it out at http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator.

Download the video here.

Keep checking here for future Patient Journey Demonstrator updates :)

Martin

Brand New Silverlight 2 Application: Healthcare Demonstrator

Martin Grayson — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:49:00 GMT

I have been fairly quiet for the last few months, and one of the reasons is that I have been working on a Silverlight 2 application, showcasing some future thinking for rich UI in the healthcare space.

The Microsoft Health Common User Interface: Patient Journey Demonstrator is the result of work from a very small team based here in the UK, and we think, is a great example of a Rich Internet Application demonstrating an LOB scenario, but using the power of Silverlight to provide beautiful, meaningful ways of representing incredibly complex data.

The blurb from the site...

‘The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (MSCUI) Patient Journey Demonstrator is a vehicle for Microsoft thought leadership in state-of-the-art User Experience for Healthcare applications. It provides exemplar implementations of Microsoft Common User Interface guidance on a Microsoft platform.

It is our showcase for new ideas, experimentation and an artefact for learning and thinking about future developments of the MSCUI program.’

The demonstrator is actually broken up into 3 separate applications, describing the ‘day-in-the-life’ of a patient from the perspective of a primary care administrator, a GP, and a registrar in a hospital. The UI is completely interactive and you are able to explore, manipulate, layer and scale the patient’s data to create rich visualisations.

Over the next couple of months, I want to blog about some of the things we have built here, how we did it, share snippets of code, and talk more about how we are developing it further.

Some of the cool things in Silverlight 2 that we are already using include (but are not limited to J)...

· Deep zoom to view complex ECG (electrocardiogram) data

· Intelligent, scaling layout

· Data-binding everywhere

· Animation and media

· Vector graphics enabling real time manipulation of chart data

A video covering some of this is in the pipeline, so watch this space!

Big thanks to the team invloved in building this...

Kirsten Disse - lead UX designer
Sergei Golubev - Silverlight UI developer
Joe Wardell - Silverlight UI developer
Neil Ashley & Tinisha Rocca - visual designers
Alam Rahman - lead test

In the mean time, head over to the site and please share any feedback / ideas either here or on our CodePlex discussion board here.

Martin

NOTE FOR USERS OUTSIDE OF THE UK:-

A few users outside of the UK are experience a bug with the Primary Care and Secondary Care demonstrators. The symptom is when they try to launch the either of these demonstrators, they see our default error dialogue stating: "This application has encountered a problem and needs to close. Please, try restarting it. Sorry for any inconvenience."

We have identified that the problem is due to current 'Regional and Language' settings. The reason is because we do various things with the formatting of dates, but have only extensively tested with the UK date format. We have now logged the issue and are aiming to release the demonstrator with the fix when Silverlight 2 Beta 2 ships.

There is a workaround though in the meantime. You can access the second parts of the demonstrator by changing you current language format to 'English (United Kingdom)'. You can access this in Windows Vista via...

Control Panel -> Regional and Langauge Options -> Formats (tab) and selecting 'English (United Kingdom)' from the drop-down.

Many thanks again, and please keep the feedback coming.

Suggestions for a Real World WPF Video, please?

Martin Grayson — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:16:00 GMT

Since creating the first set of RWWPF (Real World WPF) videos, we had had loads of great suggestions on what else we could be showing. One of the re-occuring themes is about using Blend & WPF for LOB (Line of Business) applications - such as customer account systems, and internal tools.

So, I am adding the post to gather some feedback about what people are specifically interested in seeing. Are folk after 'How to make a data grid?' or 'How do I design and LOB for WPF?' or 'Why would I chose WPF for an LOB app?' or even 'I have an app, how do I make it look cool?'.

Whatever your thoughts, please reply to this post and we will try to capture as many suggestions in an LOB video as possible.

Thanks, Martin

Real World WPF Videos: BSF Showcase

Martin Grayson — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:20:00 GMT

Two very exciting announcements for Adventures today... the first - our Real World WPF Videos are now featured on Channel 9 - all of the links below. Secondly - the second in the series is now availble to download too.

The BSF Showcase (Building Schools for the Future) was an exciting look at enriching learning and school administration through multiple platform and device technologies. I was fortuanate enough to work on this project alongside Carrie Longson and Paul Tallett as a WPF Des/Dev. The 2 videos show a walkthrough the solution we developer, and a 'behind the scenes' look at some of the cool features we added.

Check these videos out now at...

Real World WPF Videos: BSF Showcase

Real World WPF Videos: BSF Showcase, Behind the Scenes

And you can find the first videos here...

Real World WPF Videos: Introduction to Blend (Part 1)

Real World WPF Videos: Introduction to Blend (Part 2)

Real World WPF Videos: Introduction to Blend (Part 3)

Real World WPF Videos: Introduction to Blend (Part 4)

Presenting 'Harmony' - 3D WinFX Music Player

Martin Grayson — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 11:01:00 GMT

I came across Harmony yesterday, thanks to a kind e-mail some one sent us. After 5 minutes of using, I am hooked. This is a superb way to look at my music library - its like actually having the CD in my hand!

The creator admits this is similar to Coverflow for OSX, but again, Harmony is a great example of the combination of different media supported by WinFX.

Download now!

Martin

IBloks BETA now available!

Martin Grayson — Thu, 25 May 2006 11:15:00 GMT

As previewed at MIX06... the IBlock beta is now availble for testing. And it is addictive. Unless you have a couple of hours spare playing with IBloks, then stay well away.

This is set to be one of the first commercial WPF apps. What IBloks does incredible well is show WPF's simple and clean integration of picture, audio, video text and 3D. I have decided to make an IBloks dancing man of myself, photographing my face and body parts and adding them to the man, and then making him dance... just need to find a digital camera... I will upload him once I am done! :)

Martin

RSS Postit Application

Martin Grayson — Tue, 23 May 2006 15:32:00 GMT

Well, this is my second day of being a blogger, and I am well chuffed with the traffic coming onto the blog. So chuffed in fact, I have uploaded a little sample I made a while back for you all to enjoy...

I made this when I first started playing around with DataTemplates in ItemsControls. I was so amazed at how flexible the DataTemplate was, this Postit sample doesn't even scratch the surface. I could have put the data items onto anything!

In this, you can also drag the postits around, and when you click on a link, it takes you off to the web page. Whoopee! But in all seriousness, this is simply to demo how simple it is to make a simple data template... very!

I have attached the source code so you can add your own feed / improve upon it. NOTE: This is not a proper example on how to data bind... that will be coming later :) But if you make any significant changes, it would be great to see them. So, let us all know.

Til tomorrow.

Martin

P.S This was built with Beta 2 of WinFX, as will all of my project be. Most should work on previous bits, but you may need to change a line here or there.