I have entered some values in BillBoard, BBControl, EventMapping tables through direct editor...
I can see billboard for InstallFiles action, but it is not being displayed for any other action...
I am also confused what value should i give in Feature column of billboard table....
Billboards are associated with a specific action in InstallExecuteSequence, usually InstallFiles.
Windows Installer doesn't support displaying a billboard across multiple actions. So using billboards is a good solution only for very large installers for which InstallFiles action takes a long time.
For smaller installers a better solution is using HTML host controls. This way you can create your own HTML with some slides. HTML host controls are supported only by some commercial setup authoring tools which offer an external UI.
Edit:
The main question is how long is your installation process and which action is the longest. You can determine this by creating an install log. If it's 1-2 minutes, it's not worth the effort. If it's 10-15 minutes, you can try this: http://kb.flexerasoftware.com/doc/Helpnet/InstallShield2011/IHelpEUDialogsBillboard.htm
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I'm a UI designer working and I want to get a better understanding of what is required for the most efficient and streamlined way to handover of assets to developers - both for the developer and also for me.
I was of the understanding that since SVG files are lossless, they can be resized "on the fly" using CSS/HTML and therefore can just be supplied once (instead of at all the various sizes) - is this a reasonable assumption?
I work with very detailed pages where there are a lot of instances of the same icons and I'm trying to avoid having to "mark for export" (I use Adobe XD) every single instance of an icon on every page. My preference is to provide a master UI file which contains once single instance of each icons in the project.
Any thoughts / input appreciated!
I have not been able to try anything because I'm not a developer and can't see how this works in the code.
I'm looking for some high-level help with determining the best type of Visual Studio 2010 project to use for an Excel custom application.
I will be developing a program that requires the user to enter a dataset in a particular way. Not using a form per se, but rather in columns and the program will need to do some custom validation on the items in order to prep the data. From there, the user will be able to conduct various operations on the data via a custom Ribbon and associated options. The program will also transmit the data via web service.
I've fooled around with the Add-In project and that gives me a lot of what I need but I'm wondering if a Template or Workbook project is better for this in terms of data entry and being able to "guide" the user a little more.
How do you go about choosing between which project type to use? Do all the project types support a custom Ribbon?
Sorry if this is too far off topic. I'm referring to VBA, not Visual Studio, but it might still be relevant.
With an AddIn, compared to a Workbook, you can separate your code from the user's data. So, if the code is complex, and you'll need to update it separately from user's workbooks with data, this is not a bad idea.
With an AddIn, you can add buttons that do things like check to make sure the user data workbook is ok, or process it in someway. However, the AddIn custom buttons will load ever time a user opens any Excel worksheet. This doesn't sound good, but in practice, isn't so bad. You can code your AddIn so it does nothing as long as no one uses a button, so it almost doesn't hurt load times, etc...
A Workbook might be useful if you need to really guide the user - that is, you cannot rely on the user to hit a button to verify something, and instead you need to verify on every change, for example. However, the workbook solution incorporates the user data and your code in the same workbook, so if you need to update the code for existing users' data, that's harder.
I use a combination of AddIn (.xlam) with buttons, and a template (with minimal self-describing data only).
I'm not sure about the template-only option, so won't comment on that.
I think about a solution (I guess, server based solution), which inserts affiliate ids/logos into an windows installer (setup.exe, set's up a video converter program, nothing fancy) on the fly.
I see the process like this:
1) User clicks on the link with affiliate ID, link requests server for a download file, system on the fly inserts affiliate's logo and id in to this installer... but I guess this solution is rather a science fiction, cause I can't imagine that this can be done on the fly in seconds.
2) So as the second way of doing this, I see a script/program which automatically creates setup files with affiliate's logos and ID's and stores it on the server, for example, once a day.
Any solutions available on the market of doing this? Or, maybe, this can be achieved with simple HEX editing?
I have a custom task pane I've made in VSTO for Outlook 2007, but it needs a fair amount of screen real estate to be functional. I'd like to just take over the place of the Reading Pane, as it won't really be needed when this addon is active. It's also a really great spot since this addon relies on drag-and-drop from mail folders to this task pane, and the closer I can get it to the folder pane, the better.
Any way to replace the Reading Pane, or at least toggle it's visibility?
I dont think there is a way in OOM to do this .. I you can change the size of you region though.
I have seen it done though with add-in-express tool http://www.add-in-express.com but that may be 2 much work for you to change to that model.
Take a look at the Replacement or Replace All Form Region options. Both of these options allow to replace the display of form region.
The Replacement form region let's you build a custom first page of your own.
The Replace All form region let's you build all form pages.
These are not simple options as you must provide all Outlook capabilities the user expects. This is why the Adjoining form region option is the popular choice.
You can read more here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dd492010(v=office.12).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/bb206784.aspx
So, I've been tasked with making a kiosk for the office for showing statistics about our SCRUM progress, build server status, rentability and so forth. It should ideally run a slideshow with bunch of different pages, some of them showing text, some showing graphs and so on.
What is the best approach for this? I first thought of powerpoint, but It should be able to take the images from a webserver so I can automate the graph generation procedure. I would also like to take text from an external source when showing "Who broke the build" or some page like that.
I have no doubt that ready-made systems exist, but I don't really know where to look for them.
Is this easy/hard in powerpoint? Or are there an ubiquous app that everybody but me knows about?
I would recommend creating it as a series of web-pages, which uses Javascript or the meta refresh tag to cycle though the different pages. Simply full-screen the browser on a spare machine, and connect it to a projector/monitor/big TV.
This has lots of benefits:
it's trivial to display images from an external server (an <img> tag)
it will cost nothing to setup (it can run on basically any functioning machine), and runs in a browser
it is quick to do (you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility, or different screen resolutions as you know the exact machine you are developing for
it's expandable - while what you describe is probably possible within Powerpoint, but if you do it as a web-page, you can use Javascript (or a JS framework like jQuery), and it's very easy to serve the pages via a web-server, then you can use any server-side scripting language.
Basically, you would have a series of files, say slide001.htm, slide002.htm and slide003.htm. Slide 1 would redirect to slide002 after 30 seconds, slide002 to slide 003, and slide003 would redirect to slide001..
The specific things you mention: graph generation and "Who broke the build" text:
Not sure which CI tool you use, but many of them generate graphs anyway, so that would be required is having one "slide" with something like <img src="http://hudson.abc/job/proj042/buildTimeGraph">
For the who-broke-the-build text, you would be easiest to run the slides as .php files served though a web-server, using XAMMP.
Then you would have a function that scrapes your CI server for whoever broke the last build, and in one of the slides, you would have <?PHP echo(who_broke_build()); ?>
(Obviously if you know some other language/system better, use that!)
The final benefit I can think of is that, if you serve the files through a web-server, you can allow people display it locally, say as their browsers home-page.
Thanks. I found jqS5 which did most of what you mentioned.
It requires 1 document where every h2 becomes a new slide.
I can then use the meta-refresh to reload to next page every 10 seconds. When I reach the end of the slides, I pull data from an aggregated RSS feed from all the different systems in order to pull information.
http://staticfree.info/projects/jqs5/