Rail Fleet Management System — the Foundation Stone of Logistics Chain

Speech of Leonid Osminin, Business Analyst of Digital Design Company presented at Green Logistics seminar 11 of March 2010 at Saint-Petersburg State Transport University.

Contract Programming in .Net

Design by Contract (DbC) or Programming by Contract is an approach in designing computer software. It prescribes that system components (similar to classes in object-oriented programming) collaborate with each other by agreeing on contracts, on the basis of mutual obligations and benefits. The term was introduced by Bertrand Meyer in connection with his design of the Eiffel programming language in 1986. Contract programming enables better software reliability and provides a basis for specifications, documenting and testing.

Systems Approach to Usability: Identify Design Flaws That Were Not Anticipated

What is usability? This is what takes consideration of users, their goals, tasks and environment

Being a novice concept, usability is perceived in various ways. While some people regard it as a GUI attribute (which is either present or otherwise), others see it as a measure of convenience. Many think it is a separate branch of science with its instruments to achieve certain goals. All of them have a point, in a way. Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

Usability as ROI Booster

When speaking about usability, in the first place we think of ease and convenience of use as well as effectiveness and overall satisfaction with a product. There are multiple recommendations, articles and books on usability standards, methods of improving usability and usability testing. However, you will be surprised to find out that usability does not come down to user friendliness of your product, but can help maximize ROI of your project.

Better way to use binding in the WPF applications

Common goal of the binding is notifying business objects by the UI elements about changes of the UI elements' values and setting new values to the appropriate properties of the bound business object.

We will review another way of the binding in this article - our business object will notify UI element about changes itself and UI element will be redrawn according to changes in the business objects.