At Innoveo Solutions, today we went live with our new corporate identity and announced our product name, INNOVEO SKYE.
I was quite involved into the process with the development of the web site and some minor other things.
Why a change after only 9 months?
Simply to reflect our personality, culture, spirit and soul in a more appropriate way:
VALUES /
- INNOVATION
- QUALITY, PROFESSIONALISM AND TRANSPARENCY
- TRUST AND RESPECT
- DYNAMISM AND FUN
MISSION /
- ENABLING BUSINESS INNOVATION
VISION /
- BE RESPECTED LEADERS IN CONNECTING THE INSURANCE BUSINESS WITH TECHNOLOGY
We started with an internal launch (I hope to be able to post some videos about it soon) made by Nick and myself!
Then after the official launch we had a little party with some German specialities brought by our German guy, Oli! And some from Italy brought by Nick!
And we made a little tour of the building to look at the new logo everywhere!
Concerning the web site here are some key points about it.
Technologies used:
Tools used during the development:
The website was developed using Scrum, Test Driven Development and Domain Driven Development.
I would like to make a BIG THANK to all peoples that helped into that process!
Internals:
- Nick and Didier, for their great support (finally we went through the bottleneck ;)
Externals:
- Andreas Koch, absolutely great designer (hey Andreas I am searching a designer for the new version of my website Tech Head Brothers ;-)
- Wygwam, for their great help in the field of CSS, especially Guillaume and Matthieu (and for sure my old friend Rédo and Grégoire)
- Evaluant, for their great Euss O/RM tool (and for sure thanks to Nicolas for the lunch, to Sébastien, Nicolas and Fabien for the support)
Stay tuned more to come from Innoveo Solutions
If you do have Microsoft Source Analysis Tools for C# and JetBrains ReSharper 4.0 installed in you development environment than you might get issue when you run your unit tests through ReSharper Unit Test Explorer and Sessions. As you can read on my bug report feedback:
There is known problem in StyleCop, which prevents build system of VS to report any progress. Unit Testing waits for project to be built. You can switch building to "Never" on Session toolbar and build manually, or uninstall StyleCop
Follow up on the post from Laurent “Expression Encoder 2 publish to Silverlight Streaming plugin”.
My way to upload is to use WebDav by mapping a network drive using my Silverlight Streaming Account ID as the user name and my Account Key as the password. You will find those information on the Administration Home page of Silverlight Streaming.
Then you have a direct access to your folders on Silverlight Streaming. You can then create a folder and upload your video with the name: video.vmw. And they will appear on your Manage Videos page.
Important: It is a must that the video are encoded in a format recognized by silverlight and that the name is video.wmv.
It rocks!
Today I was facing the following issue. I have an indexing system (read more here, here and here) using Lucene.Net that is working quite good. The drawback of the current implementation was that I couldn’t filter any to be indexed property decorated with the attribute. For example if I had a string property of my domain holding HTML, I wasn’t able to remove the HTML out of the string before indexing it.
I scratch my head some time, and finally came to a pragmatic solution.
For this pragmatic solution I used meta information in the name of the attribute. So the attribute decorate my code with a meta information and the name of the attribute contains by itself also meta information. This means that I enforce some rules in the naming of the attribute.
For example the first rule is the following, if the name of the attribute contains Html in whatever form, uppercase, lowercase, etc. the framework will realize that the property contains Html and that it needs to remove the Html tags out of the string on decode it.
If none of the naming rules match then it will use the content of the property directly.
So as a user of the indexing framework, I write one attribute named HTMLSearchableAttribute and decorate my properties and then the framework will clean automatically this string property before indexing the cleaned content with Lucene.Net.
The other day I was searching for a small project to get started with Silverlight 2 development.
In my today’s works at Innoveo Solutions I am spending quite some time evangelizing about Scrum framework. I found some time ago the Planning Poker Timer by Aslak Hellesøy. That’s definitely looks like a great project to implement with Silverlight 2.
So my goal is as the following:
- A full re-implementation of the Planning Poker Timer using Silverlight 2 and C#
- You can set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
- Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
- Make the colours start at blue, go red at 4 seconds and black at 0 seconds or use your imagination to let people know time is running out
- You can make the timer restart automatically at a certain time. Hitting the spacebar will also restart the timer (and make all of this text go away)
- Use it to keep folks focussed on time in other situations - like lightning talks, where you can use these settings
- Make the text bigger to fill the whole screen. This is CMD+ or CTRL+ in most browsers - or via the menu if you're using IE
- Turn the Silverlight Planning Poker Timer to a Vista Gadget
So I fired up Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview and created a first very simple project with two TextBlock and used it in Visual Studio 2008.
After less than one hour I was able to:
- Set a different time and precision in the URL. Use a precision of 10 to avoid distracting people
- Rings a bell and turns the screen red (unless you specify other colours) when time is up
- Go full screen
It is really impressive at which speed you can start to handle a project in Silverlight 2 with some .NET backgound. It was really clever from Microsoft to give the same development environment on the client that you have on the server side.
This nice project is hosted on Codeplex and you can have a demo on the following page. And for sure as all project on Codeplex you get full access to the source code.
Unable to start debugging! The silverlight managed debugging package isn't installed.
If you are facing this issue when you try to debug your Silverlight 2 Beta 2 application from Visual Studio 2008 just extract the silverlight_chainer.exe into a folder and run Silverlight.2.0_Developer.exe from the folder. You even don’t have to quick Visual Studio 2008 during the installation.
I was facing this issue in a little project I started to experience Silverlight 2. It is realted to my today’s great interest Scrum! Wait and see.
Today working on the development of a website I had the following user story to develop “As an author I want to be able to add a lightbox/darkbox around my content in Live Writer”.
First of all I updated my version of Windows Live Writer to the latest CTP version. You can download it from here: Technical Preview: Now Available for Download! Nice work Joe, it is quite stable and look really nice.
Then I needed to address this user story. To do so I thought to develop my own Live Writer plugin but with some research led me to a FANTASTIC plugin called “Dynamic Template Plugin for Windows Live Writer” and by whom, you guessed, Joe. Great work!
With this plugin I was able to implement in a very user friendly way, the needed insertion of my light and dark boxes. No an author is two click away from having it boxes on the website. Nice, really nice.
But wait this plugin can do much more than templating!
Check all videos available! Watch Example 1, Watch Example 2, Watch Example 3, Watch Example 4, Watch Example 5.
Here is the result. On the left, what you see in live writer, on the right what you see on the website.
I love Live Writer! When the pages editing will evolve it will be the must for CMS.
JetBrains has released their ultimate Visual Studio plugin, ReSharper 4.0.
This much-anticipated productivity tool includes many new features and improvements.
It supports C# 3.0 and LINQ, plugs nicely into Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 and also support VB.NET.
It includes:
- Full Support for C# 3.0 and LINQ; Full Edition and C# Edition provide comprehensive support for C# 3.0, including LINQ, implicitly typed locals and arrays, extension methods, automatic properties, lambda expressions, object & collection initializers, anonymous types, expression trees, and partial methods
- Comprehensive Insight into .NET Framework
- Solution-Wide Analysis, which looks for erroneous C# code in your whole solution on-the-fly, without compiling it first
- Code Cleanup, flexible code compliance and formatting tool bringing together a dozen of ReSharper features. In addition to fine-tuning formatting style to use, you can opt to arrange 'this' qualifier, remove code redundancies, convert properties with backup fields to auto-properties, make fields read-only if possible, optimize using directives, shorten qualified references, update file header, replace explicit types with vars, and revamp your C# code with many more settings
- New Refactorings
- Convert Static to Extension Method
- Convert Extension Method to Plain Static
- Convert Property to Auto-Property
- Convert Anonymous to Named Type
- Inline Method
- Convert Method to Indexer (to Default Property in VB.NET)
- Convert Indexer (Default Property in VB.NET) to Method
- Multiple New Productivity Features
- Complete statement; inserts necessary syntax elements (braces, semicolons etc.) and gets you to the position to start the next statement, saving you from excessive juggling with the caret.
- CamelHumps in Code Completion, allowing you to complete any symbol by entering only its uppercase characters.
- Live Templates Editor & Manager, rejuvenated set of user interface items for viewing, managing, and editing all three types of templates — Live Templates, Surround With Templates, and File Templates.
- Recent Edits, drop-down list similar to existing Go To features that shows files and symbols that you recently modified.
- Smoother Interaction with Visual Studio Ecosystem
- ASP.NET Speedup; significantly speed-up the analysis of ASP.NET pages
You might read more details about all new features or the full list of features.
I recommend printing the keyboards shortcuts available in ReSharper 2.x / IDEA scheme and Visual Studio scheme.
You might also be interested by all the ReSharper’s plugins available: Gallio, RGreatEx, Agent Smith 1.1.8, Agent Johnson, ARP Another ReSharper Plugin, NHibernate Plugin 1.0, NSpecify, Scout plugin, xUnit.net 1.0
Finally you can download a free 30-day trial version of ReSharper 4.0. Go download it, it is just a must (at least for me and some others ;)!
First you need to un-install the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 SDK from the build server! Then you can download the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 and extract it on the server, there you will find the file silverlight_sdk.msi, that will allow you to install Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 SDK.
Now if you followed my post MSBuild and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 running in Team City, then you know about the issue:
Using MSbuild to build a solution in a command line doesn’t copy the Silverlight project output to the linked web project
This issue is still there so my fix is still in my MSBuild file.
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