Joe's Blog

It's been awhile since I last posted anything - I've been pretty busy learning new programming techniques, and winning wow.

On 5-5-05 Ascendance became one of the few guilds in the entire game to take down Ragnaros, the last "End Game" boss currently in the game. You can check out screenshots and a movie here.

Other than killing Gods, my recent activities have been centered around learning as much as possible about coding Smart Client apps using the .NET Framework. If anyone is serious about learning how to program windows applications, then Soup to Nuts is an excellent starting point.

Here's a couple sources as well:
www.windowsforms.net
www.codeproject.com

Another Excellent resourse is Jason Beres' Tracker Application found here. I strongly suggest downloading the pdf book and reading it. Has lots of information about writing nTier apps.

I've also added one more WoW Addon to my UIMods list. It's called AscRaidAttend. Originally coded by Sudo of Conquest, I altered it to be a little more to my liking. I then coded a windows app to parse the SavedVariables.lua file. I've made two versions of the windows app - one that just parses the file, and you can save that to disk either as a .txt file or .csv file. I made another one that was specific to our guild. It parses the .lua file, then there is an option to upload the attendance data to our website's database using Web Services. This entirely streamlines the attendance taking process, making things a lot easier, with nearly NO data entry.


Figure 1. Ascendance Raid Attend Client

Figure 2. Ascendance Raid Attend Parser Client

During this time I've also been working on a program for my work. It's an nTier Windows Forms Smart Client Application written in C#. Using the knowlege I gained from the Soup to Nuts webcasts, and the Tracker Application, I've been constructing it the last few weeks. It's main function is to view inventory information. ProductID, Desecription, and pricing mostly.

Using a pluggable Data Access Layer it easily supports just reading the data from a CSV file, or getting the information from a Local Database (I'm currently using MySQL). I'm also currently adding XML Web Services support, so the app will be able to be run anywhere there's an internet connection to view inventory information, and I just finished adding an auto-updater. So all I have to do is push the new version onto the server, and updates are automatically downloaded and applied. Very handy.

The greatest references on architecture I've come across are the websites listed above, and especially the Soup to Nuts webcast series. Though if you're looking for a good book on just overall Winforms, I'd suggest Chris Sells' Windows Forms Programming in C#.

Happy Coding!