From: Rob V. <rv...@do...> - 2012-07-27 16:45:54
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Hey Ron CC'd the dev list and a couple of other key people who I know use the tool and may have ideas/opinions on this Comments inline: From: Ron Michael Zettlemoyer <ron...@fy...> Date: Friday, July 27, 2012 7:31 AM To: Cray Employee <rv...@do...> Subject: DotNetRDF and Store Manager > Hi Rob. A few days ago I checked in a small change that made the connection > windows in Store Manager resizable. My goal was just to be give more space to > the query and update text boxes. I hope it made sense and didn't interfere > with something you may have wanted to do? I'd kinda half noticed that, no it didn't interfere but we do need to make sure all the tabs have their controls properly anchored because I noticed in trunk right now only the Query and Update tabs scale properly. I'll likely fix that up myself later today unless you have time to do it first > > Along these lines I woke up with an idea this morning. Do you use MSSQL > Management Studio much or have any opinions about it? I'm in it a lot and in > general I like it Yes I've used it in anger and yes I do like it > So I was wondering, what if store manager were more like Management Studio? > With "registered services" to keep track of servers you have registered, and > an object explorer that shows you the servers you are connected to, the > databases/stores on the server, the namespace in the database, etc. Then we > could give the user a lot of space to edit and write queries. You could do > some neat things and it'd appeal to many dotNet people who are probably very > familiar with MSMS. Yes that is a great idea though it's a pretty big departure from what we have now interface wise though we likely have most of the infrastructure to do this ready to go already. Especially since I recently refactored a lot of the core logic out of Store Manager into a separate library to make it portable and reusable. So if we want to attempt this maybe the better thing to do is maintain the current tool as is and add a new Management Studio tool for which we need to come up with a better name than just Store Management Studio ideas?. RDF Management Studio doesn't quite work because it implies capabilities beyond just managing RDF databases Another advantage of creating a whole new tool is that we could integrate the RDF editor libraries into it (which would mean making it a WPF rather than WinForms tool) so that we could get all the document management, syntax highlighting, validation and auto-completion goodness from there? Right now expansion of the existing tool is somewhat limited by the fact that it is WinForms based and I've been keeping it as such so that it runs on Mono. A separate tool without this restriction would have a lot more scope for expansion and WPF is just much easier to build UIs in IMO. Yes there would be a fair amount of work in coding up a new interface but I think we have most of the infrastructure we need and it would be a pretty compelling tool. What does anyone else think? If we're going to build a MSMS style tool what features are present there we should aim to emulate or are missing now from the current Store Manager and people would like to see? Rob |