My company builds data acquisition and management applications for large industrial systems. When I design a view for this kind of usage I need great quantities ofsample data adhering to certain rules (e.g. the aggregated consumption of device can only increase over time).
The tool to create this kind of sample data efficiently is Excel:
How to import Excel data to Blend?
Blend supports importing sample data from xml. Now we just have to find a way to export our worksheet as an xml file.
I’m no Excel ace and simply saving the worksheet as xml produces an ugly structure. I’m sure there are ways to make it better, but since I’m prototyping I need a quick solution.
Mr. Data Converter to the rescue
Thanks to Shan Carter’s genius we have a simple copy-paste way to do this. Simply visit his Mr. Data Converter website and paste the data from Excel to the left text box. Then on the right set the output format to XML and push Convert.
Copy the results to a text editor and save it as an xml file.
Importing xml as sample data to Blend
In Expression Blend select the Data tab. Click the “Create sample data” button and select “Import Sample Data from XML…” from the dropdown menu:
From here on it’s quite straightforward. You select the xml file and add a name for the new sample data source.
There we have it! A big number of no nonsense sample values in a nicely structured collection. It only took two minutes thanks to Mr. Data Converter.
UPDATE:
You can tweak the data types in the generated xml schema (xsd) if you need to. For example if a value is not a decimal type, it will not be shown on a chart’s linear axis.
UPDATE 2:
Nope! You also have to edit the cs of the sample data. Things are getting fugly..
After our good friends from Microsoft Hungary learned about our DIWICON Simsim Advanced Metering Infrastructure solution utilizing .NET 4, Silverlight 4 and Windows Azure asked us to give a testimonial on their latest and greatest technologies presented at the Visual Studio 2010 Launch event.
I briefly introduced the AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) concept: how it helps energy suppliers reduce losses on the last mile on their infrastructure and how the instant consumption feedback to the consumers leads to more conscious behavior. It has been described in more detail in my father’s presentation at Microsoft Hungary’s Azure Lunch event.
In the background photos can be seen from our deployed systems in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Then I went on describing how the cloud computing revolution helped us to build a scalable, robust and global service version of Simsim on top of Microsoft Azrue.
Finally I talked about the topic closest to home: dynamic software prototyping, and namely Microsoft Expression Sketch Flow. I told the audience how it made our development workflow more effective and less frustrating by forcing us to making the big changes upfront, before real implementation would have started. And yes, prototyping is fun also!
I would like to thank Microsoft Hungary and my friend Zsolt Báthorfy for this opportunity and for their continuous support!
I am looking forward for our WPC10 keynote appearance with DIWICON Simsim!
I had the chance to demo our Silverlight application at Microsoft’s virtual CEE Remix event (thanks Dénes!).
It’s a web application for companies with many employees on the move.
Using the system you can track details like position, speed, driving behavior of moving units real-time or with reports. You also have a personal security function, with real-time alerting and messaging.
This solution called DIWICON-M is tracking more than 20 000 units worldwide. If you are interested have a look at it on my company’s website.
I read about the new Gorillaz album this morning. Being a Jamie Hewlett fan and watching the YouTube clips it had me hooked in a whim.
On the official site it turned out that it’s a much richer act than just an album as it comes with an opera and a short film also.
So if you love animation, progressive music, Chinese culture and well.. opera, see you in London at the evening show on the 22nd of November!
(And you can get the album for 8 EUR without DRM.)
I was upgrading my posted Silverlight projects when I ran into my oldest one.
One and a half year ago Füles was with us in the living room, wagging his tail just like in the animation I was showing to my family.
It was a great thing as he had just recovered from a serious stroke endured last summer.
Since then he passed away but the time we had with him was a true gift.
You can watch the animation titled ‘Sunrise’ here.
Today I toyed around a bit with Photosynth and my Laputa robot form my Japan trip this summer. Check out the results:
Photosynth using the given set of photos (right) automatically creates a panorama-like 3D environment. Moving around you can discover the details of the place pictured by the uploaded images (middle). The coolest feature is unfortunately hidden: pressing the control button Photosynth shows the recognized 3D structure of the place (left). It works unbelievably well.
Imagine this on a mobile device with a GPS, internet connection and real-time. It could be an interesting medium.
It’s a joy to see such a polished Hungarian Silverlight solution as the recently launched site of our 14th century chronicle by Eyedea.
It puts a really good use of Silverlight’s DeepZoom technology by synchronizing audio and text commentary with the pages creating an engaging and authentic experience.
It’s only in Hungarian yet, but I hope there will be an English version.
The Illuminated Chronicle (in Hungarian: Képes Krónika) is a medieval illustrated chronicle from the Kingdom of Hungary from the fourteenth century. It represents the international artistic style of the royal courts in the court of Louis the Great.
This little lolcat will show you a cool feature I discovered recently.
Using its ‘Tag’ property you can add metadata to a FrameworkElement (so practically every graphical element Silverlight provides) and read it out in code as a string.
Even better, you can set Tag property in design-time with Expression Blend support!
This is a start of my new project, SilverBites. It’s a series of bite sized video tutorials on Silverlight 2 with a maximum length of 90 seconds.
I’m pretty microphone shy yet, but watch my alterego in the coming parts!
