Rob Relyea: Data

WPF, DataViz, Hedge Funds

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 13:55:15 GMT

One of the key themes I see in many applications that are using WPF is that they find value in good data visualization (see SVC).

Just saw this article from WIndows in Financial Services (which I hadn't seen before) about: For Hedge Funds, WPF Delivers Agility
Just talked with a friend from outside of work...he's been playing with Blend, his company is excited about DataViz, building a practice around it...considering how to work with designers.

Rand Wacker: calls for separation of Data from UI

Wed, 30 May 2007 10:28:31 GMT

Love to see better factoring of applications as described in "Is the Web Browser the Ultimate Application Platform" from singletrack.org:

...

And that’s where I’m surprised that we’re not seeing more three-tier, multi-platform applications out there. A back-end network server for data storage and complex computation, a web services data access layer, and multiple rich-interface applications for acces, /including/ a browser-based version.
Yes, I think we should be developing applications by first thinking about the data access and storage, then layering the right interface on top of that. Another example of separating presentation from application, but planned in a way that makes it easy to build the best experience for network-based apps, without being tied into “the browser as a platform”.

Microsoft Dynamics: Fantastic 3D SVC application for LOB

Fri, 04 May 2007 23:44:54 GMT

Microsoft Dynamics demoed a great SVC (Situational Visualization and Control) application using WPF 3d @ the Mix07 conference earlier this week. Check out the video. Darren is from the Microsoft Dynamics team. Josh and Nathan are from Identity Mine. This is a great example of understanding your customer scenario and building a great solution.

A) I especially like "Step 3: define the requirements" slide:

Create a one-stop show for all the data I need to know
Show me the relationships that exist between the data
Build a visual bridge from ERP data to understandable view
Only show me the subset of data that affects my situation
Allow me to take action from with the visualization that I can understand

Seems like a great way to communicate goals for a SVC app.

B) Seems like Dynamics is a Winforms app...so this is an example of using WindowsFormsIntegration.dll's ElementHost to add great value to a WPF application.

C) Nathan talks a bunch about visualization of different data states and the challenges/techniques there.

D) Josh talks about how they derived the control from ItemsControl and made a template that had a Viewport3D.

E) Sounds like they are shipping this as part of the next version of Dynamics NAB. Cool.

F) Near the end, they have a cool customer feedback set of buttons. Nice. You could even consider using InkCanvas (like in my Mix07 session) to let people point to what they want to talk about.

G) Nice video indexing of customer feedback.

H) Summary slide: "WPF is damn cool and it transforms biz apps" Change the way people visualize, interact, understand, and think. "Products look better, are more understandable, more productive, and frankly just more fun to use.

I) Interesting question about how to show fake data (trigger off of designmode property...)

(My list of other Mix07 WPF based sessions is here: robrelyea.com/events/mix07/all)

XBD05 - Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE

Presenters: Darren Laybourn, Josh Wagoner, Nathan Dunlap

Abstract:
In this session we explore how amping design and taking advantage of data visualization techniques and 3D can make a major impact on usability and ultimately acceptance of line-of-business applications. We follow the Dynamics team's design and development of a next-generation manufacturing production planning tool from vision to eye-popping, jaw-dropping realization in Windows Presentation Foundation. A 3D application that's productive without being gratuitous. Cool!

Technorati tags: Mix07, SVC, WPF

TreeMaps, DataViz, SVC

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 18:55:12 GMT

Two nice posts from my friend Paul:

TreeMap History
Infostethetics.com - Blog discussing data viz

Since I currently can't tag a post as both WPF and Data...I wanted to reference a data related post that I made recently about SVC:

SVC (Situation Visualization and Control) application = real-time + map + dense information display + actionable

Noam Ben-Ami: Entity Data Model

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:12:43 GMT

How does EDM resonate with you? (Video of Noam Ben-Ami demoing EDM designer)

Kevin Hoffman weighs in with: Microsoft finally shows off their EDM designer... but it won't ship with Orcas?!?

Digging in, I found: ADO.NET vNext: Entity Data Model (EDM) Designer Prototype and a bunch of posts on EDM from the ADO.Net team.

The link between data and objects is a very interesting one...

Data Visualization

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:32:50 GMT

While I was digging into searches on terms similar to Situation Visualization for my post about Situation Visualization and Control, I stumbled on a bunch of other interesting material:

Data Visualization Group @ University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Next Generation 4D Distributed Modeling and Visualization - focused on battlefield visualization, this group investigated a bunch of great topics.

Data Visualization Techniques + XAML as a Better C#

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 04:57:37 GMT

Chris (welcome back to blogging actively) Anderson points to an interesting Periodic Table of Visualization Methods and an interesting talk proposal for TechEd.

Web Apps and Desktop Apps - Bridging the Data

Sat, 13 May 2006 17:20:16 GMT

Tim Anderson blogs about The Cloud vs. The Lan

No App is an Island

One lesson that I believe application authors (web and desktop) need to learn is that data interopability is critical. Applications need to be architected in such a way that many applications can share the data.

What other lessons do you take in from the scenario that Tim discusses?