COM+ average call duration

Serving on support duty, we received an issue report from our customer: some of the processes in I-Plan are silently failing — even though everything worked fine before. The first question any developer would ask in such case: what did you change? Turns out, they have installed SP2 on their Windows Server 2003, and this was the exact reason for this issue to appear. Read on to find out what causes it and how it can be solved.

Continue reading

ActiveX publisher name not available

Testing the installation of our ActiveX controls (used in I-Plan for rich-functionality — grid, graph and date/week/month picker), we noticed that in IE8 the controls display string “Control name is not available” instead of the publisher name. How does one solve such a problem?

Continue reading

Issue connecting to Oracle 9 from a .Net application

Connecting to Oracle from .NetWhat do you do when, connecting to Oracle 9 using standard DB client from .Net, an error message informs you that at least Oracle version 8.1.7 or higher is needed? We did encounter such a problem while working on a project. Thankfully, after some searching and asking, a solution could be found — read on if you are looking for an answer too.

Continue reading

Birth of an icon, steps

Sometimes all you need is a correct tool. Hammer, for instance.As we posted earlier, after looking for another company that could redesign our site, we decided to do it ourselves. Developing HTML/CSS, configuring a CMS (Joomla, in the case of this site) was not a problem for us. Yet this also involved development of visual style and graphical elements, which we, being a mostly software development and QA team, don’t do too often.

Yet it seems that with the right ideas, boldness and perseverance, anything becomes possible.

This article explains the thinking behind the icons used on the frontpage of this site, as well as the steps of creating such an icon.

Continue reading

Pricing, estimation: How NOT to

Last December, we decided to redesign our website, and, due to lack of resources, wanted to hire and external shop to do it for us. After the requirement discussions and resulting budget calculation, we decided to design and implement our website ourselves. Yet some lessons were learned, which I would like to share below.

Continue reading

PPMLite announced

PPMLite finally enters free public beta stage, and, since it allows import of projects from Basecamp, there has been a corresponding announcement over on the 37 Signals’ site. More links and reviews to follow as the application gets more adoption.

PPMLite is a simplified project portfolio management tool developed by TechWire for CloudPatterns LLC.