Many of our developers also use a Visual Studio extension called ReSharper. As part of a periodic review of our tools, we looked at whether ReSharper is beneficial overall, and whether it offers value for money.
Processing microservices data is a relatively new, but hotly discussed topic in the developer world. In our latest thought leadership piece, we examine the pros and cons of the technological and architectural solutions available and set out our best practice guidance.
To mark National Coding week in schools, some of the more recent joiners in our software team have shared their advice for pupils or students looking to learn programming languages.
We spoke to Claudia who was welcomed into OCC as a software developer intern within the Innovation Delivery team. She has been working on Ami, an online platform that connects those wanting to help in their community with organisations looking for volunteers.
ContrOCC Web is our project to migrate the market leading social care finance system ContrOCC from a desktop-installed client application to a modern, browser-based system. Customer first Customer demand sparked this change, and we have kept user and customer requirements at the front of our plans. We are keeping the overall layout of the interface the same as before so that existing users will find it easier to adapt without additional training and support. The objective is to develop a[...]
What is refactoring? Refactoring is a process of changing an application’s code and its structure without affecting functionality. Its goal is to bring the code up to date with appropriate standards and patterns, making the code simpler, more generic and less repetitive. Well-designed projects can help developers understand and maintain the code more easily, resulting in fewer bugs and faster development. New team members need less time to familiarise themselves with the product and can follow the existing structure with[...]
Before we get onto the tips, if you’re not familiar with why software accessibility is important, have a read of this short blog post from the head of accessibility at the Government Digital Service. “When I talk about accessibility, I’m using it to mean that people are not excluded from using something on the basis of experiencing a disability. Accessibility means that people can do what they need to do in a similar amount of time and effort as someone that does not have a disability. It means that people are empowered, can be independent, and will not be frustrated by something that is poorly designed or implemented.”
Our senior developers at Oxford Computer Consultants have started a series of developer tips based on our decades of experience. The theme of this first set of tips is tools and is aimed at developers early in their careers. Play and experiment Our first tip is to find time to play and experiment. Not only is this fun, but trying new things helps you learn more about your software tools. One of the reasons that children learn faster than adults,[...]
This article describes the steps that aspiring developers should take to learn the skills that they will need to become a C# Developer.
“Premature optimisation is the root of all evil”. Whilst that famous quote from Donald Knuth has some truth it, thinking about performance early on when designing and writing code can be a very good thing too. This article explores this and gives practical tips and advice that Software Engineers could use when writing software, that might yield better performance benefits with less effort.
Companies within the Health and Research sectors often operate in regulatory environments with additional auditing obligations to meet. This includes with regards to traceability within their custom software tools (including item history, item tracking, issue tracking). As such, OCC use Microsoft Azure DevOps tool chain for software development. This article explores what Azure DevOps is and why you should be using it.
There are plenty of reasons to choose Entity Framework as your database ORM (object-relational mapping) over something like Dapper that exposes SQL directly. But if you don’t know what EF is doing under the hood, it is dangerously easy to write innocuous looking code with abysmal performance. This article show you how to get optimal performance from your queries and how to avoid the worst pitfalls.
After identifying general trends in the results from OPERANDO and other user research projects relating to how users perceive software utility, our team decided to formally investigate its impact upon technology acceptance rates.
Lockdown has affected every business here in the UK, resulting in most of us working from home and so communicating remotely with our colleagues and clients. Microsoft Teams has enabled us to stay in daily contact using video and audio calls and sharing screens. But as days turned into weeks, we needed more than this.