Day 037 - Easing back in

It's been a good, long summer, Labor Day has come and gone, and now it's time for me to resume learning WinDev in an hour a day. 

I hadn't fired up WinDev in over a month, and when I did I got the following splash screen:

I can only think my WinDev brain has grown a little fuzzy with disuse, because I don't recall seeing that in a long, long time if at all. Had I set my name and password months ago and clicked on Don't display any more? Or had I installed an update and not run WinDev since? Just for fun I tried clicking Validate without entering my name. WinDev fired up but displayed the following message:

Fair enough. I didn't see any option in the menus to change my login, so I restarted WinDev. This time around I entered my name (grumbling about the forced uppercase characters) and, just for a lark, clicked on the Parameters link. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it turns out this all about the Control Centers. 

I realized I was a little unclear on the concept of control centers, so I did some Googling and came up with a page on the PC Soft site that provided some clarity. 

First, the definition: "A Control Center gives you a global view of the corresponding area, during the development phase, on a deployed site or for the maintenance and the evolution of the applications."

There are control centers for:

• Project monitoring
• Quality control
• Reusability
• Document management
• HyperfileSQL engines and databases (redistributable)
• Users (redistributable)

While reading the page on project management I came across the concept of a database of control centers, which is documented here. I've taken the liberty of reproducing the diagram from that page: 

As near as I can tell, this database doesn't form the backbone for some new management tool I wasn't aware of; it's more of a technical explanation of how WinDev managed the different kinds of data it collects about the software development process. 

By default the database of control centers is a HyperFileSQL classic database, but you can use HyperFileSQL client/server if you wish, and you'd probably want to do that if you were managing a larger team of developers. 

Satisfied with my exploration of control centers, I returned to the login screen and proceeded to the IDE. I got a window telling me this was the first time I'd used WinDev, which meant I had to go through a few setup screens (which didn't take long). Hmm. Had I used a different login previously? After completing the setup (and this time around I opted for multi-monitor display) I was in. I thought I'd have a look around for the user database to see if I could find a previous login I'd used. I tried Tools | User Control Center but I wasn't able to look anything up, and I suspected this wasn't for WinDev user management anyway. 

Back to the tutorials

Because it had been a while since I last ran WinDev, the tutorial was no longer on my list of Acrobat recent files. Happily, it's really easy to load the tutorial PDF. You can do it via ? | Tutorial | Tutorial PDF, or via the Welcome window, after you click on Tutorial:

And with that, a good chunk of my hour was done. 

When I was a kid the first day of school was lightweight. I'm keeping to that tradition today.