Author: Product Manager

Katmando Enters the Final Stretch

Product Manager

Katmando_Category_Product

After a long period of development Katmando is nearing completion. Now in Beta test it is holding up well. In addition to catalogue management a data grid has been added to allow quick access to key product data as a single view, slicing across all categories. This is excellent when you want to make quick updates to a price or inventory amount without having to click through a category tree.

Katmando_Product_Grid

This entire program relies heavily on the rich API provided by the web services extensions to ASPDotNetStorefront. Shortly I expect to return to the BackOffice development effort with a lot of lessons learnt!

Katmando – or BackOffice Lite!

Product Manager

A branch project was kicked off a while ago to produce a lightweight version of the BackOffice program to support just catalogue management. The first release of this has gone into test customized to work with the bespoke data model for eSeeds.com. Looking good!

Katmando

eSeeds.com uses the concept of Vectors to group products of a similar type and this version of the program understands this special relationship and displays things accordingly.

Once this is completed and shipped work on BackOffice will continue.

Catalogue Management Taking Shape

Product Manager

The initial framework of the catalogue management module is taking shape. The interesting part is that I am using the MVVM (Model – View – ViewModel) pattern here with two views sharing the same set of ViewModels and, subsequently, Models. This means that edits in the TreeView are reflected in the Form Edit View without having to write any new code!

CatalogueEdit

So far I can navigate the category/product/variant tree and edit the category nodes. Later I will add the product and variant editing capabilities. Then, we need to add the ability to create nodes and move them about in the tree.

More to come.

Windows 7 64 bit

Product Manager

win-7-ultimate I have been a bit silent on this blog as my focus has been on migrating all my development environments to Windows 7. I have also made the decision to move to a 64bit world to gain the advantages this architecture has. It was an easy switch given I started on a new desktop machine and could do a clean install. I then used Windows Easy Transfer to move my files from my old Vista machine to my new Windows 7 machine. Nothing could have been easier!

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Now, back to work.

Topic Editing added to BackOffice

Product Manager

The ability to call up and save AspDotNetStorefront topics is nearing completion in BackOffice. The HTML Editor still needs to be added but finding a decent one for WPF is proving a challenge. I have found a few candidate examples and hope to roll those into a useful tool here that inherits the CSS styles and artefacts of the actual site so that you really see what you get! (Windows Live Writer for blogs is an excellent example of this.)

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Inventory Management for ASPDotNetStorefront

Product Manager

The BackOffice program has made a large step forward in that the Inventory Management module has now been built and deployed to the BackOffice WPF Composite Application Framework.

InventoryForASPDNSF

Using the WSI interface on ASPDotNetStorefront the application can load the product catalog and then allow you to make various modifications to the inventory. Changes are automatically sent back to the website so that the BackOffice application and the storefront are always in sync.

Next to come is the ability to modify Topics. Following that will be a full catalog management interface.

BackOffice Application Taking Shape

Product Manager

The BackOffice application is starting to take shape. It is based on the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and is deployed as a Smart Client interacting with the eCommerce website through Web Service calls.

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At present the only module completed is the Inventory module which lets you have quick access to the full catalogue and just manage the inventory counts.

There is still a lot to add but now that the major framework is in place the next modules should slot in much more smoothly. Stay tuned!