Towards improved information architecture by redefining the hierarchy of our classes, I moved the generation of each Word object’s ScatterViewItem and associated event handlers from the Surface Window1 class to the Word class. Further, for our input and output functions, I created two XML files containing input data for dynamically generating Word and Art objects on the Scatter View:

• Collections.xml, which contains the words to be displayed on the screen as well as the ID’s of the artwork associated with each word, and
• Artwork.xml, which contains the ID and tombstone information (i.e. metadata) for each artwork.

I wrote methods to parse the XML files and got the application to display dynamic results from Collections.xml.

At the cost of a GUI-like appearance, we are temporarily using TextFields and Buttons to test our I/O functions.

After this work session, I met up with Lia to touch base and resolve some other issues we had with the event handlers for Panel objects, which receives and displays user responses to the artwork. Comparing her event handlers for populating ScatterViewItems to mine, we found no syntax errors and no difference in our logic. Still, her event handlers were not functioning as expected.

We later discovered that the solution was simply to open the Surface Simulator application before debugging on Microsoft Visual C#. This was an unfortunate oversight that cost us about an hour of time. It is our firm belief that this frustration could have been avoided had Microsoft designed Visual C# with better application of user experience principles.

After the fact, Lia and I worked briefly to create the tag event handlers for the “Movements” (previous referred to as “Time Periods”) token.