More on Task-based UI’s

Microsoft published the first article of a two-part series on Inductive UI (IUI) design, their buzzword for Task-based UI. This one covers a couple things:

  • How IUI can help users get frequent tasks completed faster.
  • What is a frequent task.
  • How you can implement a IUI design using a .NET library.

If you have ever seen an IUI design (think Task Panes in MS Office 2003), you will almost immediately see Web-style similarities. The article discusses this, referring to Dialog-style versus Web-style UI’s. The author does note that in many cases experienced users will prefer Dialog-style UI’s over Web-style. While I can agree with the sentiment, it usually happens in cases where the Web-style UI is designed to perform a long, drawn out wizard process. In most cases, such Task Panes, Web-style UI’s are just as unobtrusive and straight forward as the Dialog-style counterparts.

Since I am working on a Task Pane infrastructure for an application at work, I was also interested in the details of the Web-style navigation library used to build Task Panes in .NET applications. The library allows programmers to create pages, which appear to be frame-like surfaces you can drop controls onto. The library manages a stack of those pages. This is different than our approach, which uses the MSHTML web browser component to host a stack of HTML pages.

Update: Part 2 is available.

Getting Started With P2P

I finally have a reason to try to implement P2P in a development project. I have used TCP sockets on several occasions and I have played around with UDP broadcasts as well. What I am trying to do with P2P needs to be more reliable than the UDP broadcasts.

The first thing I did was Google for “P2P framework library”. Unfortunately, not many relevant hits came back. The most popular was the Java-based JXTA toolkit. I work in C++, so it does not help me. Microsoft has a Peer-to-Peer toolkit, but it requires WinXP SP1 with Advanced Networking. I need to support OS’s older than that.

However, both toolkits appear to have exactly what I would in a P2P toolkit:

  • Discovery
  • Peer Groups
  • Messaging (including multicast)

Working in C++ on Win32 (Win9x/WinNT/Win2K/WinXP) keeps me from using these toolkits.

I would really like to use an existing toolkit to abstract the P2P implementation details. It’s going to be hard enough to get my own data sharing protocol working on top of P2P.

Other toolkits I have looked at include HOWL (an implementation of Zeroconf/Rendezvous) and BEEP. HOWL seems to only enable discovery. BEEP seems to only provide the messaging. I might look into merging the two together. I am also looking into wrappers for Multicast over Winsock.

Update: I have decided to work with Multicast for now. In the end, I’ll need to create some kind of message protocol at which point I’ll look at the RFC for BEEP.