As part of this year’s Dev Camp we’ll be using the ASP.NET SignalR real-time communication library to synchronise between multiple views/clients of an HTML-based presentation. Some of those clients will be Android and iOS apps and so really we want to be able to use the SignalR library within those apps, and whilst we’re thinking about it, it’d be nice to be able to write the bulk of the code for those apps using C#. Not that long ago this[...]

On Tuesday 5th November, our Consultancy Projects Director Reynold Greenlaw participated with fellow CuPiD Consortium member Laura Rocchi from the University of Bologna in a one-day conference on eHealth and the Brain – ICT for Neuropsychiatric Health, organised by the European Commission. Reynold gave a presentation about Telemedicine and eHealth, based on his experience in eHealth over the last 15 years, whilst Laura presented the CuPiD project and the state of our work. Reynold argued that although outputs from EU[...]

In a recently published market research report by Kable, Smarter social services – Applications for informed care delivery (published by Market Publishers), we are mentioned as one of the leading suppliers of social care applications. With social care comprising the largest share of councils’ expenditure, local government is seeking to economize and provide smart services. Kable’s report provides insightful information about the use of ICT in social services and a close look at the local government marketplace. OCC are one[...]

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[...]

We were recently approached by a client who wanted to create a tablet app that would work offline and yet implement a large, complex C# library that was already being called by their website. For platform flexibility, the decision had been made to build a HTML5 application and therefore our main challenge was in converting the C# library to JavaScript. SharpKit We opted to use SharpKit, which is designed to help C# developers generate JavaScript easily. It is indeed successful[...]

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[...]

Recently, OCC completed a project converting MATLAB code to FORTRAN 95 which presented us with some interesting problems due to their differences in the treatment of variables, functions and matrices. This article describes how we solved those problems. Variables The most noticeable difference between the two languages is that MATLAB is dynamically typed, while all variables in FORTRAN are declared at the top of the scope. In FORTRAN, variables must be declared before use. A major challenge of converting dynamically[...]

After the success of our first ContrOCC hackday, we’ve decided to hold one every four months, to give the team a day to work on things that they think would make ContrOCC a little nicer in some way, for users or developers. The day’s projects Alan upgraded as many of our Visual Studio solutions as possible to VS 2012.   2012 improvements include better support for working with JavaScript, out-of-the-box support for the NuGet package manager, the long-awaited “collapse all” feature[...]

OCC sponsored the Young Enterprise 2013 competition locally for the Best Use of Online Media. The School of St Helen and St Katharine company Wrong Way won in early May at the South East finals and John Boyle, OCC’s MD, presented them with their well deserved award. Wrong Way sells quirky, handmade hats and boxes.

Our 1st quarter of 2013 has been a resounding success. We’ve had 9 new sales of our products, thanks to our dedicated team of directors, implementation managers and help desk all pulling together. With every new sale comes a new implementation, which we undertake in partnership with our client; migrating data, installing software and training our new users. We’ve also recently won a major contract to deploy PSOCC, our provider system, to manage Day Centre services. For this contract, we’ve[...]

Over the last weekend in January I attended the NHS Hack Day at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, with friends from Step Up Software and Dr Doctor. NHS Hack Days are weekend events that brings together doctors, nurses, developers, designers, and other “geeks who love the NHS” to create disruptive solutions to problems in the health space. Our team worked together on a novel application called the Dementia Scrapbook – a tablet app that allows content to be uploaded[...]

We recently held the first ContrOCC Developer’s Hackday, which was all about giving the team some time to work on things that would make the product a little nicer for them in some way. For example: A development task or bug that’s getting on their nerves but which isn’t getting scheduled Improving developer tools Experimental development which might or might not work A prototype solution or toy program to demonstrate an interesting idea A spec or mockup for something more[...]

OCC’s Ulen Neale is very near the completion of a huge challenge; one that he has named 12 in 12 in 12. Ulen has run his 11th marathon this year and he is planning to do one more before the year is out. Ulen is dividing the funds he is raising through the marathons equally between Sobell House Hospice and Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC) Support. There is no cure for PSC, which is a degenerative liver disease, but PSC Support[...]

Several techniques are often deployed in well-designed databases to minimise the amount of invalid data. Common ones include: Check Constraints– checks that can be made on a single row in a single table, for example: StartDate <= EndDate Height > 0 Age < 199 Unique Indexes– to make sure we don’t have duplicate entries in a table, for example: National Insurance Number Car Registration Number Triggers – a last resort for cases where “it’s complicated” or we have to check[...]