Exploring Tailwind CSS, Vue, and Vuex

Posted on by Chris Quick

Today, I’m taking a look at Tailwind CSS. This is a utility-first CSS framework. On the landing page of the site it clearly states:

Tailwind CSS is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bespoke designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override.

The goal of the framework is to provide a set of utility classes that help you define the structure and layout of your web application. It is unlike Bootstrap and Foundation because the entire focus of those frameworks is to provide a basic set of components to define a unified look of your website. So my goal is to set out and see if these frameworks work together well to build a simple web application.

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An Opinionated Approach to KnockoutJS Components

Posted on by Chris Quick

In the prior post, I mentioned my organization began to use KnockoutJS within an application we have developed for one of our clients. You can get a little more background on the project by reading my prior post.

When I first started creating components with KnockoutJS, there wasn’t any specific pattern established for handling state, properties, computed values, subscribed listeners, and event bindings. In hind-site, it began creating challenges when maintaining code as each developer had a different way to organize their code.

I took some time about 18 months ago and began to define a pattern that could be used when developing components and view models within the application. The hope was to improve the quality of the code produced and to help when maintaining the code in the future. Having unified patterns can help teams in several ways, from reviewing requirements to final code reviews. It can produce a common vocabulary and starting point for adding or updating the functionality of the application, and can help on-board new developers to the project.
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RequireJS to WebPack

Posted on by Chris Quick

There are several articles on the web that discuss converting a site developed using RequireJS to WebPack. However, in several of these articles, there are assumptions in place that didn’t fit my scenario and had no instructions on how to handle a few of the modules in use within a project that my company needed to convert. These articles were a great place to start, but then found myself really getting to see some of the power available to you when using WebPack with an ASP.Net 4.6.2 MVC application that utilizes ASP.Net core 2.2 as well.

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First Adventure into Web Components

Posted on by Chris Quick

Web components have been a topic of conversation for some time, but I had never had a reason to really take time to explore building an application using them. There are many different reasons, with the biggest one being that many of the projects I have been working on utilize some of the big component libraries like Kendo or DevExpress.  Continue reading “First Adventure into Web Components” →

Using Workflow Definition Language with Microsoft Flow

Posted on by Chris Quick

Microsoft Flow is a very powerful product and it is getting better all the time. However, I wanted to build a flow that would automatically create a date in the future when creating tasks on my Trello board. There isn’t anything built into Microsoft Flow Actions that does this (at the time of this blog post), but it can be done using Microsoft’s Workflow Definition Language.

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Relationships in PowerApps and the Common Data Model question…

Posted on by Chris Quick

Since I am unable to post comments directly to this page because Disqus is refusing to send a verification email, I am posting the question here and hope someone can provide answers.

I understand building relationships, but I need to be able to do more than use a relationship in a lookup. I need to be able to display related records from an entity based on a currently selected entity in a parent table.

For example, say I am building a work order tracking system for techs and customers. I have a work order entity and a work order history entity I would like to use. The work order tracks the original request from the customer while the history tracks the individual touch points a tech has made with the customer. I have a screen that displays the details of the work order. I want to be able to display the full history of the work order (and add more records) by going from the currently selected entity. This scenario is almost entirely missing, and in my opinion a much more common use of relationships in entities.

Are there plans to support related data in a much more comprehensive manner? If not, this could be a very limiting factor with using both the common data model and PowerApps since a lot of data structures make use of relationships to expose related data.