Talking to Jeremy Thake last night at the Perth SDDN meeting for the month he suggested I really should get a blog and start sharing some of my experiences while developing. It has been on my To do list for a long time now so I decided to get it done!

I have been working at a company called ioGlobal for about 18 months now and have been doing a lot of internal development. The great thing about my role at the moment is I am doing a lot of the IT pro side of things, but spend most of my time developing all the software we need internally. Being the only staff member with .net experience I have been able to choose my own technologies and run my own projects.

I will be talking about nifty programs I have found and ways I have solved problems that I have come across while writing a lot of these small apps. There are a few apps in particular that I think are quite interesting and I had a lot of trouble finding any information on the net about them.

First is a Outlook 2007 Timecard add-in, the ones in the market did not do what we wanted and we already had a database setup so we did not want to break the old systems we had in place. The add-in has gone through a few iterations now but I am quite happy with the end result!
The entire UI of the Timecard add-in is written in WPF running inside VSTO giving a really rich experience.

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I have also written another add-in which allows us to send emails directly from outlook into our CRM. Behind the scenes there is a basic WCF service and the UI is dynamically generated by the view meta data which is configured within the CRM. It is also done mainly through Xaml and bindings. The end result is pretty nice. The screenshot below still is a Winforms form with a WPF host. My timecard add-in now actually has WPF windows launched from clicking on the toolbar.

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I am going to call it a night tonight, but I hope someone will find my posts interesting and useful, I would love feedback as I go as well.