Coding With David

  When designing and building a software solution, you must always keep your users in mind.  These may seem like minor details or not worth the coding effort but saving your users time, money and even their business can go a long way to building customer loyalty.   Here are a couple real-life little UX and system changes that had a huge impact on a user or even a company. "Could I just hit enter" This question came from a user of a sales ordering software application.  At the top of the Orders screen, there was a text box where the user would enter a sales order number.  They then would tab or use the mouse to click a lookup / find button.   As a team, we thought the UX was very cool, just 2 steps to look or find an order.  We had a session with the user to show off our new UI, with all the bells and whistles.  They were very polite and liked what we showed. At the end, we asked a simple question, "What do you think?".  She said it ...

  Providing live data updates or data synchronization in a multi-user environment has always been a bit challenging.  I have been chasing how to do live updates and day sync between desktop applications, web applications, and even temporarily disconnected clients. I have worked with Sales applications and legal applications where users needed to work but did not have access to the internet or a network.  Even though I was able to provide a solution, they were too complex and too hard to maintain for what I care for. Thanks to ZetBit , I was able to find an awesome solution to move forward with. This solution is only using Microsoft SQL Server and a cool Nuget package called SQLTableDependancy .   For this solution, you need to enable the Service Broker in SQL Server.  This will generate events when records in the database are added, edited, or deleted.  Using the SQLTableDependancy class you set event listeners for what tables you want to listen to. Th...