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Tag: Technology

Elevating consulting-ware

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…

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…

My Google apps get a style makeover

April 29, 2007 A cleaner, more functional GMail I use GMail for my personal email, and functionally it's great, but I always thought it could use some help in its look and feel. Even the new beta of Hotmail has a nicer look. Not any more. Lifehacker recently rolled up multiple gmail enhancements and styling into one package: Better Gmail. I love the Super Clean skin, and the Conversation Preview option is sweet - simply right-click on a message to preview its content in a popup bubble.   Goodbye Newsgator, Hello Google Reader I've played with Google Reader here and there, but the look and feel of Newsgator Online kept me with Newsgator. However, using the Stylish extension, with the Google Reader theme, makes for a much nicer looking Google Reader. This was the final straw that pushed me to move away from…

Using the fcSDK in PowerShell

April 25, 2007 Years ago, if I wanted to "script" Clarify [formerly linked to www.myclarify.com which no longer exists], I would use UNIX shell scripts, including UNIX mini languages such as sed and awk, that would create dat files that could be imported with dataex. When ClearBasic was introduced, we also got cbbatch, which was a command line interpreter for ClearBasic, so we could script Clarify using CB. When we (First Choice Software) introduced FCFL (First Choice Foundation Library), which was a set of COM objects, we could script using VBScript or JavaScript making COM calls. Same story for the fcSDK. Although the fcSDK is all native .NET, it also exposed a COM interface, so we could still do scripting as we did with FCFL, but we didn't have all of the .NET capabilities of fcSDK. But now, with the availability of PowerShell, we…

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…

Turning blog entries into customer experiences

April 12, 2007 John Ragsdale points out a new product that allows companies to monitor what's being said about their products and services in the blogosphere. We've been talking a lot about this here at Dovetail, specifically how a post on a blog or forum can be turned into a customer experience. I've mostly thought about identifying problems that customers may have posted about, but John points out another interesting aspect, identifying expert users who are very knowledgeable about your products, with whom you may want to align. Very cool. A negative blog post about your company, product, or service can automatically create a support case, and the company can reach out, hopefully turning a negative customer experience into a great one. Proactively. Nice. John also talks about identifying new content sources, which I completely agree with. I pointed out in an earlier post that there's…

Google Notebook

April 10, 2007 In preparation for my CodeCamp talk on MonoRail I have started using Google Notebook, and it's excellent accompanying Firefox extension, to compile an outline and notes on supporting materials for my presentation. At this point I am just playing with it but I love how the interface integrates with my browsing experience. Notebook is ever present sleeping down there in the status bar ready to capture my thoughts or clip content I want to coorelate with what I am working on. If I want to "clip" some content from a page I just highlight the text. Right click and... Bamm, you have a snippet of the content and a URL to get you back to the whole story. At the momment it seems like I will only have time to cover some basics of MonoRail it would be nice to get into some cool stuff…

How to change the URL of your SVN repository

We just changed our Subversion repository's url from something terrible with custom port number hideousness to a URL so clean, concise and georgeous that I became brain damaged.   The old URL still works but I wanted to repoint all my checked out code to the new URL. I tried switch and it didn't work until Bret mentioned that Eclipse had something called relocate for this issue. A google search later...   command line: svn switch --relocate  <from URL> <to URL> Tortoise SVN:     I should have known all of this and likely did at one point but it just fell out of my brain.