Ok, so I haven’t written a whole lot about Touch Medical, since we’ve been creating it over the last year or so, but it’s finally coming together for a v1 FDA filing, and it’s really forward thinking and new. Some observations about VS2010 and developing for WPF…
1 – Infragistics is THE SHIT. It gave us a way to wrap a lot of “nice to haves” into what has traditionally been a cold clinical interface.
2 – VS2010, despite SP1, still isn’t completely baked yet. It’s still way faster and easier to develop for forms, and XAML doesn’t debug very well AT ALL. I think the team thinks it was worth it to be forward thinking and adopt a new language, but MS seriously needs to re-evaluate marketing XAML. It does NOT reduce work, it actually complicated things exponentially.
3 – Design patterns are a trainwreck under WPF-MVVM. We set out to use prism and fork our apps to phone7/Silverlight/WPF under one codebase. Not gonna happen. When design patterns intersect with reality you end up with tons of interops to deal with old vendor code. A good for instance is Screens, which in a multiple monitor system is required, but it nowhere to be found in XAML to date. This sucks, and is especially painful in medicine where multiple fullscreen footprints are NORMAL. MVVM is great until it isn’t (one of many noble goals that completely ignore the practical world), and while we enforced it effectively in the end, it took WAY longer than it should have and is WAY overcomplicated.
4 – Microsoft… WTF TFS? Man, it took a week to install, and has proven to be a pain in the ass all the way along. They should have kept sourcesafe separate, and not added the Sharepoint baggage, it used to just work…
Those are just some quick thoughts as we wrap up QA of version 1. The upside of pushing forward and dealing with VS2010 and WPF as they are is that we got way ahead of the curve (as long as WPF doesn’t disappear, and I think XAMl is now here to stay).
Anyway, about another week, and I’ll have a second FDA filing under my belt (still not getting rich though… maybe this time /crosses fingers).
-chitlenz
