OXFORD, UK — 7th January 2021 — Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC)—a supplier of tailored social care, healthcare, and education software solutions to local authorities—today announced the availability of ContrOCC in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store that provides applications and services for use on Microsoft Azure. OCC customers can now take advantage of the scalability, high availability, and security of Azure, with streamlined deployment and management.

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.

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone, regardless of disability, is an essential aspect." (Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and Inventor of The World Wide Web) Digital Accessibility is about ensuring that content produced is accessible to all. This is not just a moral and legal requirement but is also good business. This article delves into the benefits of paying close attention to digital accessibility, includes information on automated accessibility testing tools and manual testing methods and an interactive exercise.

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.

In this article, we discuss how to develop a mathematical model to analyse sentiment, using a hypothetical scenario of a client wishing to classify a large volume of user comments as having a positive or negative sentiment. The data in this case consists of online comments on a product. The comments do not have a specific structure but are received as free text.

It’s now 9 weeks since we transitioned to remote working. We introduced more flexible hours to help our employees better plan their day around childcare and other responsibilities. Our teams are busy with ongoing and new projects and we recently expanded the workforce, adding a UX designer and project manager. Company inductions under lockdown are a little bit different!

With more and more of our information being stored in social media, businesses and other organisations, data protection and privacy is becoming a growing concern. We want more ownership of our information- where it is, who wants to access it and how to control its dissemination. This is especially true of sensitive information submitted to institutions such as Local Authorities.

If you want to write a dynamic web application in 2019 then the chances are that you will reach out for a JavaScript solution, and that solution will probably be React. We compare React to Blazor, a new .NET framework allowing you to write in C# for the front and back ends.

Sometimes, when people are thinking about a new product or ways to improve or develop an existing product, their ideas aren’t fully formed. The Discovery process provides a framework for identifying the potential users of the product and investigating in detail exactly what their needs are. Each process is unique, adapting in response to where the customer is in their own thinking. Discovery outputs vary depending on needs, from specification, budget estimates and possible funding sources to prototypes to help clients see how their ideas might work.

Using Blazor, code written for the front-end has access to all the language features of C#. In particular, it may be useful to have a type hierarchy and make use of polymorphism. However, JSON objects have no explicit type, so how can we correctly deserialise a subtype?

One of the benefits of Blazor is that you can share C# objects between the server-side processing and the client-side processing. In this year’s Dev Camp we wanted to put this to the test with validation of dynamic forms.

In our Dev Camp this year we chose to experiment with Event Sourcing, using EventFlow for the solution. One task was to configure it to use an Azure Cosmos database instead of a SQL Server one. There were some hurdles to overcome. This post takes you through the attempts we made and the solution we found.