We’ve recently launched a site developed in Drupal CMS for the Union of Evangelical Christian Baptist churches in the Dnepropetrovsk region. Later I’ll also post a summary of the technologies used in the site’s creation, yet before that I would like to share, in a series of articles, how I approached the design and planning in this project. The first article, “step 1”, is dedicated to studying other similar sites, for information, ideas and warnings.
Using Google services (Wave, Docs) in daily QA process
There are many organizational difficulties facing small to medium Software Quality Assurance (QA) teams. Because of this, we welcome any help to simplify this work and make assignment, communication and reporting more reliable. Tools are not the silver bullet, yet with a responsible team the right tools can make a lot of difference. Read on to see how we started using Google’s toolkit (namely, Google Wave and Google Docs) in our daily QA and general development practices, as described by Dmitriy Boltovskiy, our QA team lead.
Accessing unmanaged code in separate context in WPF
In order for Windows Forms controls to work correctly in .NET Framework it is necessary to access their methods and properties from the same context that they were created in, otherwise they may display unpredictable behaviour. Usually this is a concern when using multiple threads, some of which need to modify a control’s state. All of this is also relevant for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology. However, in WPF such an issue may also arise when using a DLL with unmanaged code — this does not occur in WinForms. We’ll show an example how one can solve this issue by calling methods from the DLL in a separate context.
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.
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?
Issue connecting to Oracle 9 from a .Net application
What 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.
Birth of an icon, steps
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.
Feedback with !JoomlaComment added
Our company is improving its outward communication, and as one of the steps, we are allowing commenting of all the articles on this site. Read on to see our goals described, as well as the steps we took to enable the feedback feature on a Joomla site.
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.
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