This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

I decided to use the Univeral Windows Platform for Time Tortoise because I’m targeting Windows, and because UWP is the direction that the Windows user interface is moving (as of 2017). However, I knew from the beginning that UWP would not have all of the functionality of more established options like Windows Presentation Foundation. So as I make design decisions, I also look for ways to avoid getting stuck due to UWP limitations.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Last week I covered some of the requirements for self-hosting Time Tortoise. The next step is to package and deploy a self-hosted version of the app, without disrupting the ability to run it in debug mode in Visual Studio.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

As I mentioned last week, Time Tortoise is almost at the point where it could be used as a rudimentary time tracker. However, it still needs a number of improvements before I would want to use it instead of my regular time tracker.

As I’m adding features to Time Tortoise, it’s important to add them in priority order. In other words, add the most useful features first. This ensures the best use of time, and avoids throwing in features without a good reason.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Although far from done, Time Tortoise now has some basic functionality for tracking work time:

• Add, remove, and edit activities (the things you work on).
• Start and stop an activity timer, which creates a time segment (a start and end date/time).
• Manually add, remove, and edit time segments.
• Show the time segments associated with the selected activity.
• Filter the list of time segments by start date.

You could in theory use these features for tracking real work, but there’s a lot missing. However, before moving on to add more features, I spent some time this week on fit and finish.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Last week, I added some functionality to filter time segments by start date. Since time trackers generate many time segments over time, it’s not practical to show all of them. The list view would slow down over time.

As always, adding new functionality provides an opportunity to learn more about how the Time Tortoise technology stack works, and I covered some of that last week. However, there’s an inherent conflict between investigating new aspects of the stack, and writing unit tests first. While writing unit tests can help clarify a design, getting a new feature to work sometimes requires some initial experimentation. Integrating this with a test-first approach can lead to a lot of re-writing.

For example, consider the Entity Framework code changes from last week. Because they modified the way time segments are loaded, they required numerous changes to unit tests. But the necessary changes were only apparent after some experimentation with the EF code.

As a result, this week has been focused on fixing unit tests, and adding new ones. Here are some unit test topics from this week’s work.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

When you click on an activity in Time Tortoise, the app displays the list of time segments associated with that activity. But you don’t normally want to see every time segment ever recorded for that activity. Instead, it makes more sense to show only the most recent ones, like the segments recorded for the current day. That’s the change I’m making this week.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Consider the basic Time Tortoise workflow:

• Select an activity
• Start the timer
• Do some work
• Stop the timer

This will result in a single time segment that has the appropriate start and end times and is associated with the selected activity. The duration will be calculated and displayed in the Time Segment list view, so you’ll know how much time you spent working. Everything looks good.

But there’s one problem: in order to see your elapsed time, you have to stop the timer. That’s inconvenient. When I’m timing an activity, I like to periodically glance at the timer to see how I’m doing, especially if I’m working towards a time goal.

So it would be nice if the active time segment would update dynamically while the timer was running. That’s the goal for this week.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Over the past few weeks, I have been implementing time segments. Last week was about editing time segments. This week, it’s adding and deleting, with some digressions on unit testing.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

The typical way to create a time segment in Time Tortoise is to select an activity, start the timer, work on the activity for a while, and then stop the timer. That causes the app to add a time segment to the selected activity, with the appropriate start and end times.

But sometimes you need more control over your time segments. If you’re working on activity A, and someone interrupts you to discuss activity B, you might forget to switch activities. In another instance, you might start timing the wrong activity, and not notice it for a while. Whatever the reason, if you care about timing accuracy (and if you don’t, why are you using a time tracker?) you need a way to manually create, edit, and delete time segments.

This week, I worked on the most basic of these operations, editing an existing time segment.

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This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.

Earlier this month, I wrote about time segments, a fundamental part of time tracking. In that article, I described the implementation of the database schema, model, and view model for time segments. This week, I’ll be focusing on the user interface.

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