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When a Guid is not a Guid?

February 18, 2009   Databases are fun things. Assigning identifiers to things in your database can be important. Sometimes it is handy to have an Uber alternate key that is guaranteed globally unique. This can be useful in many ways one of which is database replication. Globally Unique Identifiers   I just ran into a spot in a legacy database where it seems they wanted to future proof globally identifying database rows. They have quite a few tables with a field called guid. That might ring a bell. In case it doesn’t GUIDs are a Microsoft implementation of globally unique identifiers. Easy to create. 16 bytes wide and lovely to look at.   string guid = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); value: ba72c396-4b49-4d95-b9d7-03d42d5d5141   Funny thing about this “guid” database field is that it’s a Unicode string 31 characters wide. You might notice the Guid value above is 36 characters. Ok, Get…

hMailServer: a free email server that’s great for demos and testing

December 3, 2008 When doing testing or demos, I often need to send and receive email. For example, Dovetail EmailAgent requires a mail server for receiving incoming mail. Dovetail Rulemanager needs a mail server for sending outgoing notifications by email, as well as for sending outgoing email.   When I'm in the office, I could use our corporate mail server (although I don't like to use production systems for testing). If I have internet access, I can use GMail, or another free hosted SMTP/POP3 server. But when I'm on the road, its not uncommon to end up in a conference room somewhere without internet access. So I prefer to have everything I need loaded on my laptop - and this includes a mail server. hMailServer   hMailServer is a free email server that's great for demos and testing. I've been using it for teh last 6 months or…

Unicode Database Conversion And Usage

August 19, 2008 Introduction   Long-time ClarifyCRM users may find themselves in a situation driven by their business international expansion which calls for ability to handle client data in languages other than English and character set other than ASCII. If the database was not originally planed to store non-ASCII data, it needs to be 'converted' to be able to use Unicode.   The conversion may involve entire database, or only selected columns, depending on the needs.   Once the decision is made to store Unicode characters in existing non-Unicode Clarify database, there are several conversion scenarios to consider, depending on: database system: MS SQL or Oracle whether all the information stored must be in Unicode or only selected data items.   Dovetail Software, Inc. researched four scenarios how to make a database which was not originally intended to store Unicode data capable of just…

Installing Dovetail Classic ASP Web Applications on IIS7

Here at Dovetail I recently started developing on a Windows Server 2008 64bit OS. Today I wanted to install Dovetail Agent as a web application on IIS7. I ran into a few problems. After gnashing my teeth for a bit I found a path to goodness. My biggest problem was 64bit related. I hope this post saves you some time getting our web applications up and running. ASP Needs To Be Enabled I believe that by default when you are adding the Web Server (IIS) role to Windows Server 2008 that the ASP feature is not added by default. Start Server Manager select the Web Server (IIS) Role. Click on Add Role Services. Make sure you have at least ASP and Server Side Includes and ASP.NET selected. IIS 6 Management Compatibility You may also want to select the IIS 6…

Support by Group Chat

June 9, 2008 One of the more interesting ideas I've seen kicking around the blogosphere is support by group chat. We use Campfire here at Dovetail as a group chat application, and we love it. It allows all of us to share information, even when we may be in different cities, and working different schedules. The chat history is saved, so its easy to catch up on past conversations. Campfire also allows us to easily upload and share files and screen shots. Overall, its been a great addition to our team's communication. (On a related note - we've shown examples in the past about sending Rulemanager notifications to Campfire here and here.) I like the idea of allowing customers to jump in and join the Campfire conversation. Probably have a room specific for this purpose. Not only would it allow interactions between agents…

Having a voicemail create a case in our Dovetail/Clarify system

March 7, 2008 We recently moved into new offices here at Dovetail, and with our new offices came a new phone system.One of the features of the phone system is that we can get an email whenever we get a voicemail. The email contains a WAV file of the actual voicemail recording. This allows us to easily be notified of, and receive voicemails, even when we're out of the office.The same rule applies to voicemails left on our support mailbox. So, if one of our customers calls our support line and leaves a voicemail message, we can get an email alerting us, along with the WAV file of the message.This is all well and good.But many of us are not on email all the time, and we have other notifications setup using Rulemanager, such as notifications to our mobile devices, and notifications via…

Sending notifications to campfire using RuleManager

January 25, 2008 Dovetail is starting to use Campfire more and more. Recently we created a room for our Service and Support staff to hang out in to act as a virtual team room. Using campfire has been very handy. It helps us share knowledge and have an on-going persistent and searchable conversation even when the team members are working remotely. Effective Support Triage   I noticed a pattern where Dan Bergondy would, quite diligently, notify the room when a support case came in. The people present would take a look at the case to triage it and discuss how best to handle it.     Excellent, in 10 minutes we had a game plan and a lot of effective multitasking going on. After this pattern repeated itself a few times, I knew I wanted to automate how Dan was notifying us of new support cases to…

New office, new phone number

November 30, 2007 We (Dovetail Software) moved offices this week. Of course we're still in Austin. We actually only moved a few miles from our old office. It's a much nicer space. The views are beautiful, and our agile development team rooms are much nicer than our old one. Once we get things unpacked and setup, I'll post some pics. We also changed phone systems. Our new main number is 512-610-5400. My new direct dial line is 512-610-5466.

Austin .NET Code Camp re-cap

May 8, 2007 The Austin .NET User Group put on another fantastic Code Camp this past weekend. I was especially proud to see 3 members of our staff presenting. You guys rocked. Kevin Miller launched a potential new career as a public speaker/presenter with a well-received talk on Monorail. The attendees were very excited about what they saw. And kudos to Kevin for coding on the fly, which flowed well and showed his confidence in his knowledge and abilities. Coding on the fly takes some stones. Bret Pettichord did a talk on Scripting Web Tests with Watir and Ruby. The participants had lab machines and were able to actually script tests. It was the only hands-on talk that I saw, and I heard  lots of good feedback from the attendees. Scott Bellware filled the big room for his talk on Good Test, Better Code - From Unit Testing to Behavior-Driven Design. He…

Drowning in waterfall documentation

April 23, 2007 I'm currently working on a customer project. They started off by sending me a Functional Requirements Specification document, then a Technical Design Specification document (and multiple revs of said doc), and before I've even had a chance to digest those docs, there's now a Change Document. The Change Document is the same size as the Technical Specifications document. Ugh. We haven't even written one line of code yet!  It really makes me appreciate my internal projects, where everyone is co-located in the same room, story cards (which are NOT specifications - they are simply placeholders for conversations), and our focus is on working software. Update 4/27/07:Today I received an updated version of the Technical Specifications document. Only this time it was in PDF format, which meant there was no way I could compare it to the previous MS Word version, so…