• ContrOCC Hackday V – Part 2

    Luke Canvin

    Carrying on from our first post following the results of our developers’ adventures in the most recent ContrOCC hackday, here is the final set of projects: Client Provisions – Julian Alternative storage – Maciej WiX – Matthew DB upgrades with F# – Nathan Generating test data – Nigel New documentation – Steph Automating deployment – Tom G Automating component testing – Tom L Web-based CSV editor – Tomasz A Parsing & Analysing T-SQL – Trevor Julian – Client Provisions As[...]

  • How to write a 5 year plan (and why it doesn’t matter if no one follows it)

    Chris Henry

    Tom Litt & I will be attending The Lead Developer conference in September – it’s a new conference with a great line up of speakers covering new and disruptive technologies (of course), tools, methodologies, and, because it is aimed at Leads, also managing teams, motivation and leadership. To warm up I’ve written an article for the conference blog: How to write a 5 year plan (and why it doesn’t matter if no one follows it).

  • ContrOCC Hackday V – Part 1

    Luke Canvin

    Our ContrOCC hackdays give our developers a day to work on tweaks, gripes, improvements, or whole new features of their choosing and then sharing those with the rest of the team. We have plenty of projects to talk about again this year so I have split this post in two; we’ll post the remaining projects soon. Here is the first set: Code analysis – Adam and Tomasz B Database schema documentation via metadata – Alan Upgrade AllTheThings to .NET 4.5[...]

  • Adding a text size widget to your site using CSS and Sass

    Luke Canvin

    A requirement we hear from many of our Government customers is that a sizable number of their users with sight impairment prefer to have a text size widget on-screen when they browse a website. These accessibility widgets are tough to implement cleanly using HTML and CSS but the advent of CSS preprocessors such as Sass and LESS make the job much easier. In this post we’ll see how we can use Sass to create a text size widget. What we’re[...]

  • Compiling Sass with Gulp in Visual Studio

    Luke Canvin

    We love visual studio at OCC. It’s an incredible IDE for software and web development and Microsoft put amazing effort into keeping up with the direction developers find themselves moving. In this case we’re talking front end web development and specifically: Gulp.js – a JavaScript-powered automated build system that uses Node to perform the tasks you find yourself doing over and over Sass – a language extending CSS (that is compiled to produce CSS) to give developers more power when[...]

  • Search engine rankings for Social Care: the 001 Taxi Problem

    John Boyle

    If you’re more than 20 years old you will remember the annual delivery of your local telephone directory; the thud as it lands heavily in your hallway, often with a crumpled cover, a testament to the efforts of the delivery boy to fit the tightly published pages through your letter box. For me, this directory was my first exposure to search engine rankings, with its wonderfully named 001 Aardvark Taxis vying angrily with 001 Ace taxis for first place in[...]

  • Asynchronous processing in SQL with Service Broker

    Julian Fletcher

    SQL Server Service Broker was introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and this article suggests several uses, the most significant of which is probably the ability to do asynchronous processing. Service Broker might be seen as the database equivalent of Microsoft Message Queuing. In this scenario, a synchronous process can put a message on a queue and then complete immediately (i.e. return control to the user). A separate process can then take this message off the queue and perform some[...]

  • ContrOCC Hackday IV – Part 2

    Luke Canvin

    Carrying on from our first post following the results of our developers’ adventures in the most recent ContrOCC hackday, here is the final set of projects: Graphically presenting performance information to the lay developer – Julian Fletcher Cleaning up the developer documentation – Maciej Luszczynski CSV Merger – Matthew Clarke F#/C# – Nathan-Madonna Byers ContrOCC version manager – Nigel Palmer An executable imports/exports specification – Patrick Donkor Improving code integrity checks – Steph Sharp Migration from within the ContrOCC UI[...]

  • ContrOCC Hackday IV – Part 1

    Luke Canvin

    Our ContrOCC hackdays give our developers a day to work on tweaks, gripes, improvements, or whole new features of their choosing and then sharing those with the rest of the team. This year we have so many team members I have split this post in two; we’ll post the remaining projects soon. Here is the first set: Converting the distributed tests config file to XML – Alan Carter Converting ContrOCC tools to use Git – Chris Griggs Visualising the ContrOCC Database – Chris[...]

  • The key to building innovation

    Luke Canvin

    Jeff Gothelf is the author of Lean UX, a book that plugs into the theory of The Lean Startup and looks at how User Experience design processes fit in with the Lean approach. Jeff was interviewed by Communitech News and described what he believes is the key to building an innovative product or company: Talk to your customers. I mean, really have the humility to listen to your customers. Learn what it is that they love about your product; learn[...]

  • ASP.NET Web API on Linux and Apache with Mono

    Mike Hewlett

    We had a requirement at OCC to build a RESTful web service that would be able to run on both Windows and Linux servers. Someone suggested we give Mono a look to see if we would be able to use the ASP.NET Web API framework served up by the Apache Web Server on Linux. That sounded great; we have a lot of experience with the .NET Framework and a lot of experience with Linux but so far have not brought[...]

  • CuPiD demo at Said Business School

    Janine Smith

    Reynold Greenlaw and Andy Muddiman attended the Oxford Startups demo night at Oxford Launchpad in the Said Business School, on 15th May where they demoed the GaitAssist smartphone app that has been developed for the Cupid project. They demoed it pretty much continuously at our very busy table to the many interested attendees and our communications manager Janine Smith joined in to lend a hand. The app continuously compares the gait of a user with Parkinson’s disease during walking with[...]

  • Finding time to think

    Reynold Greenlaw

    A personal blog post from our Director of Consultancy Projects As well as delivering products, OCC has a team that specialises in custom software development; they are behind the wide variety of case studies on our website. This combination of teams working on custom software and product development & support is, I think, unique. Once a year I take the custom development team out for a day to discuss how we might write even better software. This time we crossed[...]

  • Tom’s thoughts on AngularJS, TypeScript, SignalR, D3.js and Git

    Tom Litt

    OCC DevCamp has been a great opportunity to put the day-job to one side and try out some new technologies. Here are some thoughts on how I got on with them. AngularJS AngularJS is Google’s offering in the JavaScript application building framework arena. Having previously used Knockout I wanted to use a different framework for comparison. I’ve felt that Knockout isn’t especially well suited to large applications, and it seems to struggle in terms of performance when handling a large[...]