Developer To Designer: The work begins
time to read 153 min | 30581 words

So I started to read Product image for ASIN: 078214361X Developer to Designer , the sequel to Product image for ASIN: 078214327X Coder to Developer . I'm about half done, and mostly I got the sensation that he's telling me things that I already knows. The first 7 or so chapters of the book cover the common controls and the ways to put text and data on the screen.

The information cover there is mostly of interest to people implementing controls themselves, I think and to those who want to learn tricks of using them (for instance, I didn't know that * on Tree view opened all the decendants). I was beginning to feel disappointment when I got to the 8th & 9th chapters, where he talks about dialogs and menus. They also cover familiar ground, but they do so in a way that make you aware of things that you noticed, but weren't fully aware of. I'm going to go over the dialogs NHibernate Query Analyzer is using and re-work them according to his suggestions, they are good.

There is also a very good method of organizing menus that he shows in page 178, which is far better in giving you the overall picture of your menus. I implemented* that for NHibernate Query Analyzer, and here is the result:

Menu Items

Shortcut Key

Direct Shortcuts

File

 

 

F

 

 

 

 

New

 

 

N

 

 

 

 

New Project

 

 

N

Ctrl+N

 

 

Mapping (.hbm.xml)

 

 

M

Ctrl+M

 

 

Configuration (.cfg.xml)

 

 

C

 

 

 

Query

 

 

Q

Ctrl+Q

 

Open Project

 

 

O

 

Ctrl+O

 

Save

 

 

S

 

Ctrl+S

 

Save As

 

 

A

 

Ctrl+L

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exit

 

 

x

 

 

Query

 

 

Q

 

 

 

 

Execute Query

 

 

E

 

F5

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

 

Open Query

 

 

O

 

Ctrl+Shift+O

Window

 

 

W

 

 

 

 

Next Window

 

 

N

 

Ctrl+F6

 

Previous Window

 

 

P

 

Shift+Ctrl+F6

 

Close All Windows

 

 

C

 

 

Help

 

 

H

 

 

 

 

Online Help

 

 

O

 

 

 

About

 

 

A

 

F1

I will post a full review when I'm finished reading the book.

* Wrote that using WikiTables, and that wasn't really much fun at all, the moment you get to col spans & row spans, it is getting complicated. But it's still much better than plain HTML.

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