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APIs for Clarify

Static image October 23, 2007 When does it make sense to write a routine from scratch, versus using a proven API that has all the testing done? The answer comes down to time and cost of course, a different equation in each case.   A recent dialog in the ITtoolbox Clarify forum illustrates the dimension of the issue. A user asked for advice on Clarify’s Assign Case functionality, and he was hoping to find some reusable code already existing.   “The objective is: When a case is getting created with a specific information (Keyword) in a user defined field (in one of the tabs), the case needs to be automatically assigned to a specific user.” – Clarify Assign Case functionality   The auto destination rules in Clarify will make this assignment, but it requires studying the documentation – a non-trivial task in itself – to finesse the methodology.…

Clarify Rule Manager: The Final Answer

Static image October 16, 2007 Clarify Rule Manager, and Dovetail RuleManager, are the all-important modules that manage the business rules such as when to escalate an open case to the next level of response. Being able to work with Rule Manager is crucial of course, and questions arise from time to time.   One conversation about Rule Manager and Time Bombs in the ITtoolbox forums lasted for six years. Started in August 2000 with a question about time bomb errors, the thread finally ended (or so it seems) last year, when Dovetail Software, experts in the Clarify install, supplied the last word.   “When a rule changes via the Clarify classic client, Clarify creates a timebomb with the title of the rule and the flag of 131076 (0×20004). No other information on the timebomb are relevant (relations are all null, the times are the zero time, etc.).…

MVC Code Crush

October 10, 2007 It feels a little warmer over here sitting around the Microsoft developer Alt.campfire. Microsoft just came on out and publicly embraced the MVC pattern for web development (think Rails). Nestled gently inside of Asp.Net they have planted a nucleus of testable, extensible, and separation of concern compliant goodness. I can’t wait to watch it grow and mature. While watching Scott Gu present their MVC on Asp.Net Framework (can we get a cooler codename please?) at the Alt.Net conference I felt very strange. I felt that suddenly Microsoft gets me. At the time it would have seemed pretty normal to have Scott Gu break into song with smiling woodland animals surrounding him nodding to the beat. I think they slipped stuff into the coffee. They pretty much nailed everything I love about Rails and MonoRail and .Net under one umbrella. Lets…

Being Alt.Net

The Alt.Net conference held right here in Austin last weekend was awe inspiring. The quality of the people who came and the sessions they convened was outstanding. This was my second Open Spaces conference and I don’t want to go back to the old way. Much that I wanted to discuss was talked about. I would have attended each and every session there if it was humanly possible. Torn between sessions like DDD-jujitsu and A Microsoft Futurespective I was often flitting between sessions. Sorry there was no Developing Zune plugins session going on. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I feel confident the tenants of this movement will continue to grow and dare I say become normal and everyday. I want to thank each and everyone that came from near and far to attend I learned a lot…

Microsoft is changing the world – at least part of my world – for the better

October 8, 2007 I’m a big fan of Hugh McLeod, and being that I am part of the Microsoft ecosystem, I have been following his Blue Monster Project. In a recent post, Hugh says: That if Microsoft wishes to change the world, then changing themselves is also, most definitely, a big part of the equation. I saw some of that change this weekend. I saw Scott Guthrie present his team’s new ASP.NET MVC framework. Listening to Scott present, it was clear that he and his team had been listening to the community. They’re listening to the bloggers, the MVPs, the ALT.NET crowd. They listened, and the result was a positive change that came through loud and clear. In the closing session of the ALT.NET conference, Scott Hanselman (who joined Microsoft just a mere 3 weeks ago) openly commented about his time at Microsoft,…

ASP.NET MVC framework

This was an unbelieveably exciting session at the ALT.NET conference. Scott Guthrie demo-ed an upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework. It rocked! The principles: Separation of concerns, unit testing, red/green TDD, maintainable Extensible and pluggable Enable clean urls and HTML Integrate nicely within ASP.NET + .NET core code, support static + dynamic languages Everything is based on an interface, including IHttpRequest and IHttpResponse, which makes them mockable. Jeffrey has a good overview here. I am not an ASP.NET developer. I am a Classic ASP developer. I have watched my co-workers develop ASP.NET (using webforms) and found it overwhelming and confusing. I have been recently watching Ruby on Rails developers, and I have been jealous. Templating that makes sense, clean separation of controller and views, explicit and clean HTML, and testability. At first look, it looks like Microsoft has encapsulated those same principles…

BDD (Behavior Driven Development) Discussion at the ALT.NET conference

I’ve had very little exposure to BDD, so I was interested in learning more. Specifically, most of my BDD knowledge has come from Scott Bellware, so I wanted to hear what others had to say about it. I listened to Scott Bellware’s explanation, but he seemed to focus more on the value (from his standpoint), as opposed to really answering the question “What is BDD?” He stressed the work soluibility. It was great to hear Scott Hanselman question that nomenclature and replace it with grokability. Grokability is more soluable than solubility, commented Roy. I agree. The big questions that seemed to go unanswered: Why should I care about BDD? What benefit does it give me? What I walked away with was a way of using ubitiquous language to bridge the gap between the developers and the business. Joe Ocampo than…

Friday night at the ALT.NET conference

This past weekend was the first ALT.NET conference, held here in Austin, TX. Right from the start, I knew this was going to be special. The list of attendees was amazing. It’s like my blog roll, but live! The format This was not your typical run of the mill conference, where we yearn for interesting hallway conversations to break up monotonous presentations filled with canned PowerPoint presentations. This conference follows the Open Spaces format. Our own Doc List facilitated the conference, and did a great job. He introduced us to the format, and laid out how it all works. It’s completely self-organizing. As attendees, we openly offer up session topics that we want to talk about. Anyone (and it seemed like almost everyone) offered up a topic – some people suggested multiple topics. Like minded topics were gathered together, and…

Using modern JavaScript libraries to create a better user experience in fcClient

September 26, 2007 Over the last couple of years, a number of very useful JavaScript libraries and frameworks have been introduced that make it tremendously easier to build rich web applications. A few of the more popular ones: PrototypeScript.aculo.usMooTools These frameworks allow developers to easily write very rich, cross-browser web applications. I've heard about these libraries for some time, and have experienced many great web apps that use these libraries. So I asked myself whether I could use these modern libraries with fcClient. The answer is a resounding Yes! A simple example: Modify the Save/Discard/Cancel page in order to improve the user experience. How it used to work If a page was "dirty", meaning that data on that page had changed, and the user attempts to dismiss the page (such as by clicking the Done button), then a Save/Discard/Cancel window is posted, which is a new…

SOA: It's NOT about technology

September 17, 2007 Sam Gentile (uber-architect) gently reminds us: SOA: It's The Business Stupid! SOA has value only when applied from a business perspective. The primary goal of SOA is to align the business world with the world of IT in a way that makes them more effective. Period. Technology is only significant in the delivery phase and if we hit customers up with [insert any product here] without understanding the business drivers and processes, not only are we not doing SOA but we continuing to hype technology as the answer, and further disappointing customers with yet “another wave” of application integration technology with different products than the last time. Well said Sam. Way too often, we see technology solutions put in place without a good understanding of the business needs. We must understand the business needs first!