Don Bakke
SRP Editor 2.7 Released
As promised in our recent holiday newsletter, the next version of the SRP Editor has been released today. We have updated the version history page so you can go now to check out all of the latest changes.
One enhancement of particular note is documented as “updated service-oriented metadata to support routines that can access other service modules“. Most of you are probably wondering what that means. The only other place where similar information can be found is in the history log for v2.6 where we “added support for displaying autocomplete dropdowns for service-oriented stored procedures using user-defined metadata.” Again, I’m pretty certain this still doesn’t help. That’s okay. We never highlighted this enhancement before now because we really wanted to get the final set of features implemented first. This was accomplished with the SRP Editor 2.7. We are excited to present these features to you, but to do this justice it requires its own blog post. We’ll have this article published in just a few days so keep an eye out for it.
OpenInsight 10 – Universal Driver 5.0 (aka UD Grows Up!)
When we wrote our article stating the reasons we were looking forward to the 2015 Revelation User’s Conference (and why everyone else should have planned to go as well) we noted one of the more intriguing enhancements was related to RevRCL (aka Universal Driver) and its ability to restore clients in case of a network disconnection. As it turns out, this was only one of many welcome enhancements that will come as a part of the new Universal Driver 5.0.
The Case of the Misbehaving Manifest File
We recently helped a client move his commercial software product from a traditional install and maintain deployment model to a cloud SaaS model. While the transition seemed to go relatively well, the client began reporting visual display issues with some of the forms. After a bit of analysis we were able to identify that the problem primarily affected check box, radio button, and combo box controls. Issues ranged from disappearing labels when the control got focus to dropdown list boxes never appearing.
OpenInsight 10 – The New IDE
As a first follow-up to our inaugural review of the 2015 Revelation User’s Conference and the public reveal of OpenInsight 10 it seemed appropriate to focus upon the heart of the product itself: the IDE. This also happened to be the first major component that was shown to the attendees who waited eagerly for the first glimpse of the long awaited product.
RevCon 2015 and OpenInsight 10
It is the week after the major company event of 2015 wherein Revelation Software at long last revealed to the public their upcoming crown jewel: OpenInsight 10. Certainly there have been glimpses of the product by those who diligently followed the Building OpenInsight 10 Blog. Yet, nothing compares to the experiencing of having the product make a live appearance, in full display, on the big screen, and in all of its shiny glory.
ARev32 – Emulating Port Based Printing
When Revelation Software announced the development of ARev32 many years ago, we must confess that we were not overly enthusiastic about the news. After all, it was hard enough trying to convince our long-term Advanced Revelation (aka AREV) clients to finally upgrade their systems to OpenInsight. ARev32 seemed to be just another way for businesses to remain standing still with their legacy systems. Of course, all that changed when many of our accounts began to face the dilemma of upgrading their workstations beyond Windows XP. Yes, a full conversion to OpenInsight would still be ideal, but we had to admit that some businesses simply do not have the budget for a project of this scope. Faced with the prospect of losing the client for a cheap off-the-shelf product, we quickly discovered the value of ARev32. Suffice to say we have become converts and great admirers of this product. It is truly remarkable how well it preserves the AREV look, feel, and functionality. There are a few differences, of course, but these are typically the result of the underlying technology required to implement ARev32 as an emulated environment. Fortunately, most of these are easy to work around.
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SRP Controls – When Methods are Better than Properties
As any developer knows, end users are often teaching us programmers a few things from time to time. They instruct us to better understand their work flow. They point out flaws in our assumptions, especially regarding what we think is easy to use. They also help to expose gaps in our documentation.
Such became the case in a recent discussion forum thread involving the SRP Schedule control. In this case, the end user (i.e., a developer programming the control) found out that she could crash OpenInsight or produce some interesting visual anomalies through the repeated use of the TimeBlockList property. This certainly revealed a bug within the SRP Schedule control’s inner workings which we were quick to fix. However, it begged an important question: why had this gone unnoticed before, especially during our own internal testing?
