OCC provides social care software technologies that allow local authorities, service providers and the public to interact efficiently. Over the past 6 years, the emphasis of our research has changed significantly due to social services policy changes. These encourage end-users (the public) to choose and drive activity, with local authorities having responsibility to monitor and manage the situation, allocate budgets, etc. Highly flexible and sophisticated systems are needed to allow individual user to effectively configure different services and workflows to[...]

DBA Julian Fletcher discusses some easy ways to improve database performance As anybody who has worked on projects involving a large amount of in-database processing will know, performance is a top priority. Clients usually consider poor performance to be a bug in much the same way as ‘traditional’ bugs (unhandled errors, getting the numbers wrong, things simply not working, etc). So our product and custom development release cycles include tasks to ensure we get good performance out of new features[...]

The next generation of ASP.NET is on the horizon Back in August we ran a lunchtime miniconf video that introduced us to Blazor. It began as a proof of concept from ASP.NET team member Steve Sanderson, who saw an opportunity to run C# and .NET code natively in the browser by compiling it to WebAssembly – a highly performant, assembly-like language that runs alongside JavaScript. Back then he was using an old open-source project called DotNetAnywhere to provide access to[...]

Software consultant Matthew Clarke writes about how Visual Studio 2017’s cross targeting makes it easier to mix projects based on new technologies with existing code. Our new wave of product development projects has been steaming ahead with the latest in Microsoft technologies: .NET Standard v2, .NET Core v2, ASP.NET Core v2, Entity Framework Core v2. Quite fittingly then, sometimes you need two target frameworks. It’s not possible to forget about the whole of the product’s legacy codebase and sadly it’s[...]

A recent survey of social care directories found OCC’s MarketPlace offers one of the best user experiences for those seeking information and advice about care. Socitm, the society for IT practitioners in the public sector, carried out the survey in December 2017. It reviewed 152 council sites on a range of user experience criteria, including: how easy it was for a user to find the site content and presentation of information, including the clarity of headings and the relevance, continuity[...]

OCC database expert Julian Fletcher describes how SQL’s ForceSeek can be used to combat database deadlocking and blocking. One particular way of using tables in a SQL database can make them particularly prone to deadlocking (and deadlocking’s sickly cousin, blocking). This is where ‘working data’, generated by and used in a complex set of calculations, is temporarily stored in one or more tables. Whereas any one process will probably access only a very small percentage of the rows in a[...]

The most successful apps and products generally have something in common: as well as meeting a need, they are a pleasure to use. They provide the features a user wants in a clear and intuitive way, and create a satisfying journey that anticipates and focuses on user needs at every step. So how do you get it right? How can you be sure that the interface presenting your innovation to the marketplace is providing great usability?

Software consultant Matthew Clarke shares his experience of moving to version 2.5 of Xamarin.Forms. Despite only being a minor version bump over Xamarin.Forms 2.4, version 2.5 has made some rather radical breaking changes. These are currently only “Obsolete” warnings but I’d advise you to act now before they become build failures. The most disruptive of deprecations affect Android but they touch all parts of your code. The chances are they’ll affect you, as they touch some fundamental areas of Xamarin.Forms.[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Articulate.js Articulate.js is a simple, free (MIT license) jQuery plugin that uses the Web Speech API to speak the content of a web page. This could be useful in a broad range of circumstances, but particularly as an assistive technology for those that have problems reading text on[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Xamarin & .NET Standard (Core) .NET Standard is now supported by Xamarin. The .Net Standard is the specification of which .NET APIs are available on all .NET runtimes – including the full framework, Core and now Xamarin. The upshot is that if you use a library or assembly[...]

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has begun to work with local government teams on transforming their online services to use some of the new technology developed by GDS for central government. So far, there have been 2 pilot projects across about 15 councils, focusing on parking permit and older person’s concessionary bus pass services. The aim has been to redevelop these services end-to-end using GDS expertise and the new GOV.UK Verify service. The interesting thing is that GDS has documented[...]

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development. Security in the news Data breaches are on the rise and the media is increasingly publishing news stories on the subject. Some of the breaches happened years ago and are only just coming to light. For example, Yahoo had two hacks three years ago that have only recently[...]

The OCC Innovation Delivery teams – Fusion, Trilobites, Puffin and the OCC UX Design Studio – hold regular Technical Chapter meetings to help advance cross-team knowledge sharing. The meetings cover a wide range of topics, usually around technologies used in on-going project work, but also on tools and techniques that benefit the development process. Docker Compose [Fusion]​​ Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. Operando has lots of modules, each one being a Docker container and[...]

OCC Innovation Delivery hold fortnightly Technical Chapter meetings to help advance cross-team knowledge sharing. The meetings cover a wide range of topics, usually around technologies used in on-going project work, but also on tools and techniques that benefit the development process. IIS ​ARR (Application Request Routing)​​ Greg told us about his experience with ARR. This IIS component is required when you want to forward requests to another machine on a port that isn’t port 80. One of the settings is[...]