Designer
Designer
Designer is the program that is used to create a User Interface for the Orbiter. Designer has not yet been re-written in LinuxMCE. While functional, it is not terribly user friendly, and it only runs on Windows. It requires the .NET framework. Eventually an entirely new cross-platform Designer ought to be written. However, since it is still usable, this has been considered to be a low priority for us.
Designer is very poorly written, and we do not recommend that any developer put much effort into writing new code for it. It needs be completely re-written from scratch.
To makes matters worse, it was originally written using our own .NET data access classes, similar to our sql2cpp. These classes only worked with the MS SQL Server back-end and were crudely hacked to work with MySql's ODBC connector. They are not easily maintained.
For Version 2, we plan to use the open source MySql database.
Re-writing Designer is a pretty big task and the current version remains usable for the most part. The database scheme is hopefully not likely to change much in the new Designer version. Any User Interfaces developed with the current version, therefore, hopefully will be usable in the new Designer version.
The User's Manual explains how to use it. There is no Programmer's Guide for this version of Designer.
