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Removing an iframe by using AJAX

November 25, 2009 One of our core products at Dovetail Software is our classic ASP application, Dovetail Agent. This application has been in production for many years, and is very stable and reliable. However, since it is a classic ASP application, there is a lot of room for improvement. I recently upgraded the Notification feature of the application. Dovetail Agent is a web application that has a main page (the console), and notifications need to be delivered to users automatically, without the users having to find them manually. In the previous releases of Dovetail Agent, this process used an iframe control on the console. The source page for the iframe control would query the database for new messages. If new messages were found, a hyperlink would be displayed on the console, and a window for the notifications was opened. The source page for…

Industry Insight: Social media

November 5, 2009 The impact of social media on business has far reaching effects and in all directions. Consumers around the globe share their opinions about products with anyone, anywhere. The popular digital playground Twitter recognized the impact of digital media on the marketplace so much that they now offer a vehicle for companies to see what consumers say about their products. This trend is not going to recede, but broaden and expand.How does the influence of social media guide and direct the customer service and support industry? Are there ways to mitigate damaging “tweets”? How about capitalize on positive blog posts?We'd love to hear what you think, so leave a comment below. 

Adding a Custom Dialog To Your Wix Installer

November 4, 2009   Recently I made the move to Wix3 for a couple of projects and I have been quite happy. One of the things that has been simplified is adding a a custom step into the installer process.   I’ll leave the heavy lifting of how to insert the custom dialog to Jan Schepens’ post Making a custom setup dialog using WiX 3.0. He tells you how to customize your UI layout and insert a new dialog into the process. Read this post it explains it well. Neil Sleightholm has a similar post Customised UI’s For Wix that is about removing dialogs from the layout.   I’m going to be straight with you. This post is mainly for myself. I want to have this resource six months from now when I need to do the same thing again. Wiring Up Your…

Simplification

November 3, 2009 Just replaced this VB (shudder) code ' Build up additional info string using ' research time as formatted string addnl_info = "Elapsed time = " t_long = research_time If t_long > 86400 Then t_long2 = t_long 86400 Else t_long2 = 0 End If t_long = t_long - t_long2 * 86400 addnl_info = addnl_info & VB6.Format(t_long2, "000") & " " If t_long > 3600 Then t_long2 = t_long 3600 Else t_long2 = 0 End If t_long = t_long - t_long2 * 3600 addnl_info = addnl_info & VB6.Format(t_long2, "00") & ":" If t_long > 60 Then t_long2 = t_long 60 Else t_long2 = 0 End If t_long = t_long - t_long2 * 60 addnl_info = addnl_info & VB6.Format(t_long2, "00") & "." With this VB (shudder) code: addnl_info = "Elapsed time = " & GetElapsedTime(research_time) & "." ... Private Function GetElapsedTime(ByVal researchTimeInSeconds As…

A week of Monospace and Innotech

November 2, 2009 I spent last week at the Monospace conference, which was held concurrently with the annual Innotech conference here in Austin. Monospace This was the first year for Monospace, and it was fantastic. Scott Bellware did a great job of organizing the conf, bringing in top notch attendees, and providing fun after-hours activities as well. Miguel de Icaza (founder of the Mono project) attended, along with a good chunk of his team. There were plenty of local folks (including a few of us from Dovetail), folks from Microsoft, as well as a bunch of international developers as well. It was an incredible bunch of super-smart folks, all willing to share and help others kick ass. From the Monospace website: Monospace is the conference that teaches .NET software developers and organizations how to use the Mono framework and Microsoft .NET to leverage…

Basic Web Application Loading With JMeter

October 23, 2009 I needed to load test one of our web applications today. Load testing is not something I am too familiar with. A search turned up a list of open source load testing tools. At the top of the list wasApache JMeter which I decided to gave a shot based on the awesomeness of the Apache project. I am not quite blown away but I was able to get a load test up and going in about 15 minutes which makes me very very happy. Here is what I did to create a load tester for our Dovetail Seeker web search service. Get It   Download JMeter Extract it to a directory and run the .\bin\jmeter.bat batch file. You’ll likely need Java installed for this to work. Now weren’t you afraid after seeing Apache that some horrible text file would need to be edited? Thankfully this is…

What Is Under The Hood In Dovetail Mobile?

October 13, 2009 Dovetail Mobile is our first shipping ASP.NET MVC based application. Because this is a newer technology one of our customers asked for some guidance on customizing the application. The following is a distillation of that guidance which I hope might come in handy for future Mobile customers. Customizing Dovetail Mobile (Agent Lite) Dovetail Mobile and its desktop skinned alter ego Agent Lite is a ASP.Net MVC 1.0 application. There are lots of reading and tutorial resources available that will translate directly to understanding how this type of application works and thus how to customize Dovetail Mobile. It is important to understand Model View Controller based web applications to know where the part you wish to change is most likely found. Controllers If you need to customize behavior you will likely need to add or modify controllers and their related views.…

Clarify Architect position

September 25, 2009 For any of you Clarify peeps out there looking for a gig, there’s a Clarify Architect position available in Cincinnati Ohio. Requirements: Very Strong experience with Clarify/Amdocs product platform (Customer/Call management systems) Strong experience with installations, configurations and migrations of Clarify product platform Strong experience with TIBCO. Should be able to perform installations and configurations, as well as setting up interfaces etc Experience with Tuxedo and Weblogic are required. Should be able to perform installations and configurations, as well as any troubleshooting Note: This isn’t a position at Dovetail, and I don’t have any vested interest in filling this job. I’m simply sharing an opportunity with my Clarify compadres.

Running Multiple Instances of a Windows Service Using TopShelf

September 24, 2009 Here is another one where I post about something Josh and team did that I borrowed and am using to great effect. When a console app or a windows service needed we like to use TopShelf to get the job done. In this post I’ll show how to get two instances of a Windows service running on one machine using TopShelf. Updated: As Mike points out in the comments below as of revision 46 Dru added a command line parameter to handle this scenario. Great! Much better than our hacky solution below (written before this revision). Please skip this post and just add a service install /instance:<name> argument at the command line to install additional windows services. Here is an example: YourApplication.exe service install /instance:NumeroDos Now back to the original post which should be ignored so stop reading now <grin>.…

Extension Methods I Use A Lot

September 23, 2009 C# extensions have been around for some time and it was a fad for a while to post your favorites. I am following way behind the extension party bus with this post of my favorite extensions. Most of these are poached from Chad and Jeremy and Josh with a few sadly only one of my own mixed in. Below is the Basic Extensions class that is common to a lot of our Dovetail projects. I am not a big believer in class libraries for simple little things like these as extensions that are useful on one project will be useless on another. using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; namespace Dovetail.Commons { public static class BasicExtensions { /// <summary> /// Write string to the console. /// </summary> public static void WriteToConsole(this string stringValue) { Console.WriteLine(stringValue); } ///…