ProjectMix

The aims of this project were:

• developing a scrum support system which would allow PM’s and team members to add, edit and organize tickets, tasks, sprints and more in a modern and fluid fashion
• make the most out of Silverlight’s high-end features (animation, data binding and templating)
• use Telerik’s great suit of Silverlight controls
• use innovative ways to present interrelated data

The development was a breeze thanks to the easy to use controls of Telerik and, to some extend, also a fun challenge to try to use as many of them in one project. The linking of the different entities through a diagram-like visualization was a custom control developed specifically for this project and makes use of the path-listbox. Microsoft Expression Blend was extensively used here and it would have been really difficult without Blend to achieve the same level of sophistication. Indeed, Visual Studio provides a solid environment for coding but lacks the visualization-oriented features of Blend (for animations in particular).

Due to the fact that the application ended up being rather large, the MEF mechanism was used for dynamic loading of assemblies. For some other things Microsoft Unity injection was used.

On the server side, all things were developed using WCF RIA services and Telerik’s OpenAccess’ ORM. Here again, it was great fun and a huge productivity gain to use OpenAccess. Some minor issues popped up but were kindly solved by Telerik’s support.