Getting old skool with my GUI...

Over the last couple of hours I've been working, and reworking, on a tool I've had in development (off and on) since July, its a visual designer in C# to help the non-technical produce some very complex nested XML which can then be passed through a code generator to basically produce a whole system.

So, this GUI is very very complex.  At the moment I'm dividing and conquering one aspect at a time, I'm at that position where the basic assets and window management is down and working, I've got a good menu system and the data (XML) is loading and saving nicely...

The next step is to set about the actual visual representations of the entities in the data, plus all the functionality to allow... dynamic renaming, showing process connections & flow etc... 

And you know what, for the first time since I moved in with the now wife, I think I'm going to have to get old school about it, I'm going to have to get pages of design drawn up, some data dictionaries and delegate maps laid down on paper... I'm going to then have to do something very very old...

I'm going to have to stick these papers to the walls and around my monitors to get the job done.

I've not taken to posting notes or sticking designs to walls around me as I work since I was at Uni.  I first did it when learning to program, and then got over it, then used it in my degree a lot as I would leave a project to do lectures then return and try to pick up where I left off... In the days before subversion, wiki's and bug trackers this was how I progressed work.

And I can employ all those tools now with the stroke of the command line, but... They don't give me a visual link from the GUI I want to produce and the abstract data I have to represent.

Sometimes, a pen and paper, plus some long hard thinking and some bluetac win out.

The wife will not like this, but hey the office is mine.

P.S. The wife has decided to buy me a new chair for Christmas... I now have to troll the office stores in the surrounding cities for the perfect one... Ironically I know the perfect one, I used to own it, but when I moved in with the wife (then girlfriend) I had two office chairs, she made me give one to her Mother... which is the brilliant one... and I was made to keep the newer one, which just happened to be a similar colour to the carpets... which is a shame, because this chair I have is the most uncomfortable piece of shit, it leans right and always wants to roll backwards - despite being on a perfectly flat floor.  So, new chair... The trick is, can I get exactly what I had before?...