After the prolonged release of 2.0, I promised to get back to shorter release cycles. So, despite the summer holidays , here it is.  I’ll keep this post short too.  There’s a new Expander style, and various fixes.

Happy UI designing!

• Nuget
• GitHub release

James

I’ve been beavering away at a little website and decided – after a bit of investigation and then seeing Scott Guthrie talk at Azurecraft, London – to use DocumentDb for the data storage.  At that point I didn’t have a massive amount of experience with NoSQL databases, but when I want to learn something I like to dive straight in, start coding, making mistakes, and hopefully come out the other side with some workable knowledge.

The website is node.js based, and I found the initial setup of DocumentDb pretty straight forward after running the the tutorials.  I was up and running quickly, but I soon realised I wanted a tool for developing and testing queries, and playing around with my dev database.  The Azure portal isn’t massively geared up for this.  I saw one application, but even in this web/cloudy world I knew that with my arsenal of Material Design In XAML Toolkit and Dragablz libraries, I could throw together a desktop app to grease the gears of developing the web app.

Yesterday I published the first full alpha release of that effort.  “doobry” is simple to use, yet slick and pretty feature rich.  With it you can:

• Edit and run SQL queries
• Create, edit, copy and delete collection documents
• Work with multiple databases

It’s open source, free to use, and an installer is available:

• Source project on GitHub
• Homepage with installer

It’s also a great showcase of all the things you can do with Material Design In XAML and Dragablz, utilizing features such as:

• Docking and layout persistance
• Advanced dialogs
• Transitions

Hopefully if you are using DocumentDb this tool will help you get along in your development and support tasks.  And if you are developing WPF Material Design/Dragablz applications you might find some UX inspiration and helpful XAML techniques within the source.

Notifications are an issue.  We are overloaded with them.  A long time ago computers were invented to do things for us.  But now one of their primary purposes seems to be to sell us stuff or to get us to visit web pages or apps for longer (and of course that just leads to more advertising or selling).

My phone now  bombards me with so many notifications I have reached saturation point.  I just don’t care any more and I’m suppressing all notifications for an apps at OS level without a second thought.

It seems the latest onslaught seems to be the “no permanent opt out” UX anti-pattern which is starting to appear on websites, now that browsers are implementing notification APIs.

Just check this:

I can’t say “No”.  Just “Later”.  The website doesn’t trust me to answer the way it wants, so it will enforce the question on me, at regular intervals, for perpetuity.  I can hear the excuses from those responsible, “but the user might change their mind, how will they find the setting?”

Well, I’ve yet to change my mind.

Here’s another example of this nefarious anti pattern in action:

I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve now had to answer this question from Twitter.

It has become beyond irritating.

Happy 2nd Birthday!

Material Design In XAML Toolkit Turns Two Years Old

On 1st February 2017 Material Design In XAML marks it’s 2nd year since it appeared on GitHub. Right up front I have to apologise for all the bugs I haven’t fixed. Plenty of people are helping out, but the project can only move so fast. I always try to prioritise API quality over cramming in more fixes and updates. Hopefully this shows, as I feel that on the whole the library is easy to use, robust, and ultimately helps make apps look great.

It’s been a busy, successful, and rewarding two years. Sometimes frustrating, always educational. I’m continually dealing with users over email, Twitter, GitHub, Gitter; it’s now got to the point where support is probably 75% of the time I spend on the project. Surely the biggest highlight for me was getting a Microsoft MVP award off the back of this work (and Dragablz), and traveling to Seattle for the MVP Summit. It was great to meet so many people I’ve got to know on GitHub and Twitter.

Two years in I’d like to share some stats on this project. .Net itself is undergoing major open source shakeup, with a big emphasis on the web/ASP side of things. WPF is perhaps more of a “niche” tech, and may not be the bleeding edge XAML platform a anymore, but still has plenty of use, and the some of these stats illustrate the continuing popularity of WPF and the growing popularity of the toolkit:

• Nuget downloads: 84,839
• Average Nuget downloads per day: 118
• GitHub stars: 2,340
• GitHub forks: 4734
• GitHub average views per day: 1675
• GitHub average unique visitors per day: 319
• Website average unique visitors per day: 177
• Gitter chat room users: 300+ users

Two years ago, all these stats were a big fat zero. The trend has been upward ever since. I’ve seen and supported students, enterprises and hobbyists use the toolkit to help bring modern styling, palettes and UX flow to their desktop apps, and there are now
continually new projects appearing on GitHub referencing the library.

This isn’t a monster JavaScript framework, and is much smaller than friend, and big-brother WPF project, MahApps. But it’s healthy, and it’s growing.

Currently I’m focusing on “doobry”, a NoSQL editor for Azure DocumentDb. I feel this is becoming a great example of how to utilise Material Design In XAML on the desktop to create useful, attractive apps. Obviously there will be more to come for the toolkit itself over the next 12 months.

Thanks to all the users, contributors and everyone who has supported the library over the last 2 years!

(Birthday Cake from https://material.uplabs.com/posts/happy-birthday-icon