June 13, 2007
The PowerShell Guy points out two useful downloads: PowerShell Quick Reference Windows PowerShell Graphical Help File Good stuff.
June 12, 2007
We use a client-side JavaScript object for creating tabs in our web applications. Unlike in the Clarify Classic Client, tabs in our web apps are the same page as the parent. When you click on a tab, you are actually displaying the HTML elements on that tab, and hiding the HTML elements on the other unselected tabs. It's all a bunch of Dynamic HTML (DHTML) goodness. It's trivial to make tabs visible/invisible, reorder tabs, resize, etc. The case page in fcClient is a good example of the use of tabs: Here we will walk through the steps needed for creating and using tabs within a page. In your ASP page, Include the javascript code for building a tab <script language="javascript" src="../code/tab_builder.js"></script> In your ASP page, Include the stylesheet <link rel="stylesheet" href="../stylesheets/webagent.css" type="text/css"> Create an array of tabs var ArrayOfTabs= new Array(); Add…
May 31, 2007
37signals warns about four letter words. We've run into this here in our development in the past. "We can just do ..." This tends to result in redesign later on down the road. I'm guilty of it myself at times. Once you acknowledge it, recognizing when it happens becomes easier.
May 29, 2007
John Ragsdale points us to noHold, which is a more conversational form of web SelfService. A dialog is much more engaging than search results. And you can easily escalate your question to a support agent at any time. Linksys' implementation is pretty slick. From www.linksys.com, click on Technical Support, then Ask Linksys. I especially like their abundant use of screenshots in the resulting articles. I tend to grok things much better with screenshots as opposed to straight text.
May 25, 2007
Funny read: Real Programmers don't need to write test applications! "The real problem is waiting for those damn QA guys to finish testing!"
The New Yorker has a good article on feature creep vs. simplicity. "And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers. Often, the result is a product like Microsoft Word 2003, which has thirty-one toolbars and more than fifteen hundred commands."
May 24, 2007
I've been working on a web services project for a customer over the last few months. I'm in Austin, the customer is in Atlanta, and the developer on the project is also in Austin (but not in the same physical office as myself). I needed a way to work with the developer and the customer on defining the web services, the interfaces, and the logic within. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was drowning in the customer's waterfall documentation. I needed a better communication vehicle than emailing Word documents back and forth. I created a free wiki at pbwiki, which was super easy to do. Then, I started writing. From the office. From home. It was great. I created just a couple of pages at first. Defined the work to do for the first iteration. Marked it as…
May 23, 2007
Back when I was working at Clarify, a good chunk of my time was spent doing custom development work, i.e. consulting-ware. We developed the code, and handed it off to the customer. We (the consultants) did some testing, but the customer was responsible for the bulk of the testing. There seems to be some sort of difference in mindset when developing a product versus developing consulting-ware. I'm not sure why. I've been working with one of our developers on a customer engagement for the last few months, working on some custom web services, amongst other things. For this project, we've incorporated some of our standard development practices into the consulting project. Unit Tests and Integration Tests The biggest practice we've pushed into custom development work is tests. We're delivering to the customer a set of Unit Tests, and a set of Integration…
May 16, 2007
Hugh again reminds us of what's important: Reminds me of one of my favorite sayings from Kathy Sierra: "So, how does this help the user kick ass?"
We had a support case that came in this week asking if there were issues with expanding a varchar(255) field to a larger value, such as varchar(500). Specifically, this customer was asking about expanding the internal notes field on the notes_log table (table_notes_log.internal). This customer is on an older version of Clarify (version 8 or version 9, IIRC), but they're using a more current version of Microsoft SQL Server (either 2000 or 2005, I forget exactly which one). These versions of MSSQL can handle much larger varchar lengths. I believe MSSQL 2000 can handle up to varchar(8000). I think the 255 limit is left over from the Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 days. It should work, I thought. One way to find out: let's try it. My environment for this test is Clarify 9 with MSSQL 2000. Clarify Data…
