Business and Technology Stuff

A New Milestone In Understanding Object Oriented Programming

sales@jimclay.com — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 23:02:00 GMT

Have you ever had something that you understood what it was and thought you understood how it worked, but couldn’t quite wrap your mind around how to use it affectively. This has been the case for me for some time with regards to inheritance in regards to development. Because of my background I develop in VB.Net. Up until just the other night I thought I had got a pretty good feel for OOP. Then I saw something and realized I had been missing a major part of it all along.

I am using DevExpress (DX) tools for my development including their eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) ORM product. At home, in the evenings, I am in need of an application to track info about a collection I have. So I thought that this would be a good opportunity to play with the trial version of their eXpressApp Framework (XAF) that comes with my Enterprise subscription.

My background is from the Database side of things. I love dealing with relational database models and laying everything out. So over the past couple of years as I have been working on our in house app at work, this is the thinking I had in my mind when developing the XPO model for that app. I played with inheritance enough, but now I realize that I didn’t understand it enough and that is why I dropped it. But after looking at how things work in XAF I have a whole new understanding and respect for the usefulness of inheritance.

The thing that really drove it home was who an object could be stored in two tables in the database. The base object properties in the base object table and the inherited object’s additional properties in a separate table in the database. I just wasn’t getting it before and couldn’t understand the true usefulness. But after looking at who XAF worked, things just clicked. I definitely have to rethink a lot of my existing in house system, although, much of it can’t be changed, there may be some that can and it will be very useful.

I still have a long way to go in terms of fully understanding XAF, but playing around with it and watching the videos about it on the DevExpress web site has made one big difference for me. As I go through a make my little home use app, I will learn more.

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Tags: vb.net,OOP

Testing Live Writer and DNN

sales@jimclay.com — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 05:34:00 GMT

Most of my sites use DNN including this one. I have been swamped at work and home and haven’t been logging on much lately so haven’t been posting. I use Live Writer at work for my internal status updates blog on our SharePoint, and wanted to see if I could use it for DNN. A quick search and sure enough, it will work. This is my first attempt at a post with Live Writer. If it works, maybe I will actually post more often.

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Tags: DNN,LiveWriter

Working on a few new sites

sales@jimclay.com — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:30:00 GMT

So while I am working like crazy trying to make progress on our in house app rewrite that I am succeeding in getting further and further behind on, I need a few distraction. A couple of people have asked me to host and design new sites for them. So I am in the process of getting them up and running.

A buddy of mine and his family started a new part time business and had me put up www.doggonecrazyhotdogs.com for them.

There is a new local resteraunt that I have the domain up, just waiting for content from the owner. That site is at www.jettygrill.com.

A friend of mine who does promotional products (www.shamrockad.com) got me in touch with a new car dealer in town and I am just getting started on thier site at www.sandpointcars.com. I think it is looking rather nice.

Now off to bed so I can get up in the AM and start programming!

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Re-Writing Our In-House management system

sales@jimclay.com — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:18:00 GMT

Although under the gun and stressfull, I have decided to rewrite our in house app that I have been working on for several years. This is actually pretty cool as I get to change a lot of things that I wish I would have done differently that were causing issues.

The original app was an Access program that I wrote for the company as a consultant in '99. We went through several additions and changes and then I came on board as an employee in '02 and converted the data over to SQL Server, while leaving everything else in Access. This was OK other thans some limitiations and compatibility issues as the newer versions of access came out. Now, the system is just getting slow and Access 2007 is a dog. SO...Its time for a rewrite.

Since I came on board as an employee, we have tried a couple of differenc CRM packages that just didn't work for us. So I wrote our own in VB.net. No I am getting proficient in .net and have added a DevExpress Enterprise subscription to my tools and the time has come.

It's pretty cool being able to redo everything and learn from the past. The amazing part is that I am expecting to do this in a fraction of the time that it took to write what we have now.

Off to code....

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Been Busy

sales@jimclay.com — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:20:00 GMT

So, I keep thinking of things I would like to blog about...Doesn't happen!

I have been very busy at work trying to build up steam on the complete rewrite of the original Access based system that we run the company off of. I am moving it to VB.Net with DevExpress controls. I am using the Xpress Persitent Objects (XPO) as the basis of the new programming model for our systems. WOW! Majorly cool stuff. XPO is a business object model tool that allows you to create the business object that you are dealing with including associations (one to many, many to many, etc.). You define what database you want to use and it creates and manages the schema for you. No more creating tables, creating a datalayer, creating stored procedures, etc., etc. So far I am very impressed and am loving it. I am also using thier controls for all of my Win Forms. Their grids are amazing and I was extremely excited when I saw the Vertical Grid. It is a huge time saver for me.

I am hoping to start using thier ASP.Net controls sometime in the near future. Been thinking of writing an interface to my domain registration system that I use. Since I am big on DotNetNuke (DNN), I figured I would write it as a DNN Module.

My problem is time. I have work all day and then come home and want to spend time with the family. By the time I can sit down to the computer, I really don't have a lot of time to get too heavy into something. Plus, I am tired and ready to go to bed. I guess I need to start small and work my way up. Any chance I can get I need to set some plans in place and get started.

Looks like it is that time...Of to bed.

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I Hate Spam filtering Services you have to register with

sales@jimclay.com — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:57:44 GMT

If you are in busines, DON"T use these spam filter services that force the sender to click on a link in the response email, put in some info and then you email will go through. I consider these COMPLETELY unprofessional. I can't believe businesses are buying into them. If you need spam filtering use something that the sender doesn't have to deal with. At our office we have spam software that works with our Exchange server. Catches probably 95+% of our spam. Through my hosting business, for those who use my hosted email, there is some basic spam filtering in there, but I also offer an add-on that puts your email through a Barracuda spam filter appliance. These things work great and the cost is worth it.

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SalesForce.com

sales@jimclay.com — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 16:59:00 GMT

As mentioned earlier, I work for a small company that like to be on the leading edge. We are very proud of our customer service, but our sales and marketing efforts have been admittedly, pretty weak and unorganized. I have all these grandeous ideas with regards to what we need to do, but the issue is time an other important things getting in the way.

So, we have decided to commit to a prebuilt sales tool. We are going to use Salesforce.com and I now get to integrate it with our existing systems that I have built. This is somewhat of a love it/hate it concept to me. I am ecstatic about increasing our sales efforts and having the tools in place to do this. I am also excited about learning new technologies. I mean gees...That is one of the things I live for! But on the other hand, it will take me some time to get this thing up and running and we are under a MAJOR time crunch. And I need to make some quick dicisions on the integration aspect. I am hoping and expecting, that in the long run, it is a much better solution that what I could develop in house.

Off to my new adventure!!!!

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Looking for a video training solution

sales@jimclay.com — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:16:00 GMT

I work for a great company that is small but VERY advanced technologically. I am sitting on hold with Dell right now so we can try and figure out a solution for an idea we have come up with here.

I have found TechSmith's Camtasia Studio, which will record a screen area along with voice narration and a web cam image. We want to use this to record all of the various activities that we do in our systems. This is not that hard...The hard part is playback. Since we all use dual monitors here, we need to record and render a double wide video. With that, we need to playback the video across to monitors...Thus spanning the video.

According to Dell, this is more of a software issue than a hardware one...So, off to Google and more research. I guess I will try and contact TechSmith and see if they have any ideas.

More to come.....

So, in doing more research, all it is is a setting on the video card. It needs to be changed from "Dual View" mode to "Span" mode...Problem solved

On to bigger and better things!!

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