I’ve been working allot on RemoteX’s Windows Mobile application recently. The goal is to make it run faster.
I started using EQATEC profiler, as its the only profiler I found that can run compact framework and profile performance. The Microsoft provided profiler only profiles memory usage.
I started by profiling features in isolation, starting with the offline functionality. The reason I started here is because the data access is affected by the offline functionality. Secondly I start to test the user interface.
After some profiling I noticed a single method, which took between 1000 ms to 500 ms to execute. What was special about it is that I knew that this specific method was executed on the UI thread. It took some refactoring, but now it is changed to execute only if that part of the UI gets shown.
I also noticed that setting Form.Owner is an expensive operation, so avoiding it seemed like a good idea. For me it meant checking if we actually need to set Form.Owner before setting it.
End result, now the UI is much faster. The refactoring I made affected roughly 75% of all views in the application.
Today was the first day after my vacation, at work. Most of the time is spent on planning and discussions how we’re going to move forward with the product. But I did manage to get some code in place.
During the discussions we also figured out a way to deliver some value to our customers in a minor feature. The initial idea was to create an excel spreadsheet that could fetch the data needed from our REST service, to create a report. This isn’t what were doing.
Instead were allowing printing on some new entities in the domain, extending our printing feature to be able to produce the desired output. This was roughly one hours work for me, as the printing feature was built just for this type of extension. Along with a change-set I had I could also add the ability to print entities by right-clicking on the anywhere in the application.
Now the extension points working in a design is one thing. But the design of this particular feature caused quite a bit of commotion in the days it was implemented (It touched on breaking DRY, since the presentation models for printing were closely similar to the entities). So it’s comforting to see that the design is holding up even as the feature grows.
We’re just about to finish a feature in RemoteX Applications, allowing us to match resources to different jobs depending on the requirements of the job and the Resources qualifications.
In RemoteX Applications you can now decorate a Resource with a set of Traits that describe his qualifications. Likewise the job is marked with a set of traits describing the requirements for the job. The end result is that the jobs can be matched to specific resources. If a single resource is matched the system will select that resource, but if more resources are matched the user selects between resources qualifying for the job.
Requirements are inherited to a job when you create it. So a job at a specific customer automatically receives a set of requirements as defined by the customer. This behaviour is extended to services objects and alike, reducing the amount of specification needed by the people registering jobs.
I found the video for RemoteX Applications nomination video for .Net Awards 2008 in Sweden. It’s available on msn here. Since it’s for the Swedish .Net awards the Video is in Swedish.
