by Bobbi Perreault
21. April 2008 23:13
Share on Facebook
Here's my business need: I need a way to keep people coming back to my eCommerce site. My site sells Heating and Plumbing supplies and my customers are usually DIY'er types and very independent. I'd like to help them while they're designing their heating systems. So I've decided to add a tool to the user area of this site which will enable people to design their infloor heating layout.
This tool needs to be intuitive and self explanitory. This software should be freely available. It should allow them to work with their drawing (uploaded) or
to draw the areas out themselves. It should draw to scale. This software should be very easy to use and it should not make them think too much when they're trying to get their diagram produced.
Here's what I'm starting with: Silverlight 2 SDK component - a drawing program called Scribbler. See it here: http://silverlight.net/Samples/2b1/Scribbler/run/default.html
Start with the WidgetCreator (this is another of my projects, I'll tell you about it soon)- remove the pieces that make the imagemap and keep the shell. Add in the drawing classes from Scribbler - place them into a folder out of the way to keep them organized. Add to the Scribbler base classes to support special drawing objects such as Rectangle, Manifold,and Pex run.
So that's my starting point. I'm going to share it all on this blog. I hope it works!