My focus for DevCamp was building an Android app that would interact with the presentation web app in realtime. For that we made use of a toolkit called Xamarin, as well as the ASP.NET SignalR library, and Git for source control. Xamarin Xamarin is a toolkit that allows you to use C# to write code for native Android and iOS apps. I had a good experience with this overall. I hit a small bug where changing the namespace caused a[...]

We’ve already made it to the third of our successful product hackdays, giving 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. The day’s projects Alan – Test scripting improvements I did some prototype work on a new version of our “TPA” test scripting language. I wanted to store a representation of the test objects and commands in the application’s configuration tables[...]

I have just upgraded an old .NET 1.1 WinForms app that uses the CSLA Framework, to .NET 4.0 and a newer version of CSLA. A large part of the reason for doing this was the data binding improvements, for example: being able to update binding on change instead of when validating (losing focus). I have several custom user controls, one of which was a NumberBox. Essentially it’s just a textbox with a few properties such number type, decimal places etc. I exposed[...]

Keith, from Burford School, just spent a week doing coding for one of our research projects. Here’s what he said about his time here: “I really enjoyed my experience at OCC – I’d done quite a bit of programming before, but never in large projects. Working at OCC, I learnt lots about project control and teamwork in programming, as well as learning about new technologies such as MVC 4 and Razor. When I got a placement, I thought I would[...]

Microsoft has just announced its entry into the tablet market, the Surface. Designed and manufactured by Microsoft, Surface will launch this Autumn and comes in two models: A more powerful, expensive, thicker & heavier (13.5mm, 903g) one running Windows 8 Pro on an Intel chipset comparable to the latest ultrabooks. This tablet will be able to run demanding desktop applications such as Office, Photoshop and others. An attachable stylus will also be available for handwriting and annotation. A cheaper, more[...]

Day 1 was spent settling in and setting up in the beautiful cotswolds. After supper and before turning in, they get stuck into business splitting up the application tasks thus: Server-side – RavenDB and ASP.Net MVC – Mariusz and Neil Client-side – Backbone.js and HTML5 – Tomasz (and Andrew, when he arrives) UX – CSS framework(s) and JavaScript – Luke They will do a fair bit of pair programming before moving on to parallel development after getting the basics done.[...]

At OCC there are regular presentations between the engineers on any technical topic of interest. We’ve decided to post a recent one on a technique called Object-relational mapping. Object-relational mapping in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in relational databases and object oriented programming languages. So it bridges the gap between the database and the code that uses the data. ORM can be used for Fast prototyping and any data-based product that doesn’t have[...]

Flowplayer is a Flash-based video-player that supports streaming video using the Adobe’s Real-Time Messaging Protociol (RTMP). Amazon CloudFront is a content-delivery network (CDN) tied in with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and can stream via RTMP. Great! This is a simple-to-set-up, cost-effective, and reliable video-on-demand system. Where you can get a little bit tangled up is the way the video resource is identified to the player. Following the recipe for Flowplayer with the RTMP plug-in, you need two values, the[...]

OCC software is being submitted for approval by MCERTS. This is the Environment Agency (EA) Monitoring Certification Scheme. As OCC provides software for air quality monitoring, we have attracted interest from “MCERTS for Software” which is new. As the EA document puts it: Problems with Data Management can have a number of serious adverse effects Nothing new there. So what’s involved in MCERTS certification? It’s one of those happy occasions where a standard imposes reasonable and not too onerous restrictions[...]

The oldest software process is “code and fix”. This actually works on small one-man projects, but as a system grows, bugs become harder to fix. A typical sign of such a system is a long test phase after the system is “feature complete”. Such a long test phase plays havoc with schedules as testing and debugging is near impossible to schedule. The classic response comes from engineering, whose methods try to plan the software process in detail for a long[...]

The conventional approach to making videos or other data available online is to buy a server and host it at an ISP. This requires up-front capital costs for the server, and development of systems to keep track of backups, redundant copies, and scaling up as your needs increase. An alternative approach is to use storage web services, such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3 for short. Your files are stored on the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive[...]