So lately I joined a company which has been developing on their core business application for several years, which has seen multiple developers over the past years. As in many projects there has been a huge lack of documenting the source code.
My job is to organise the code, find dead code, make stuff more efficient etc.
Because this project is a 80+ class project I would really appreciate a class diagram to give me some overview of the project.
When I do a search most anwsers date back to '11 or '14 which suggest to use OmniGraffle. Well I do have OmniGraffle installed on my macBook but I need to have the Pro version to create diagrams from Xcode projects.
Is there any WORKING tool out there on the WWW that could help me out, or maybe some one with a OmniGraffle PRO license to confirm that this functionality is working? In that case I will advise the company to buy a pro license.
Thanks in advance,
Tom
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I'm about to start a fairly large project. I have about 10 different PC/MAC Flash(AS 2.0)/MDM Zinc software packages I have inherited from a previous programmer. They are a series of math educational applications that are all contained on numerous CDs which is pretty frustrating for our customers. I've been tasked with converting these applications into a digital medium with emphasis on iOS/Droid compatibility.
They don't want to ditch the flash because of the way it's written and compiled with MDM Zinc it would almost require a complete rewrite. Currently the customer installs the application using Disc 1 of their set and the application will pull the lesson material (SWF files) from the discs in the set. I want to move these lessons onto a web server and build a single client app. Something that just works as a generic container for these lessons.
Currently I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and Xamarin to build these containers. Unfortunately my strongest languages is vb.net and not C# though so It's taking a little getting used to. Does anyone have any tips or light they may be able to shed on the best way to go about getting a foot hold in this project?
I've pretty much decided I'm going to have to build this "container" from the ground up. Here is an example of the software I'm working with http://184.168.83.81/Math7Demo/movie100.htm
Thanks in advance
As a fellow developer who works with e-Learning for almost a decade, I'd say your best bet is to build the containers with PhoneGap, convert the SWFs with Google Swiffy and load them as HTML inside your app.
Newb here learning rails... any advice/comparison of community engine v. social stream? I'll be writing a dating site, so especially if either lends themselves to that development I'd appreciate the advice.
I have tried CommunityEngine in the old days. Currently to use it with rails3, you will have to use a specific branch mainly updated by the community to make it stable. i'm not sure if that rails3 branch is production ready yet.
I don't know community engine, but have been looking at social stream and it looks very well put together.
We upgraded social stream to a mobile platform by exposing api end points - it took a couple of months. We built separate controllers for each call rather than modifying the core classes. The platform is now flexible enough to cater for any use case and we can hook in to updates on the trunk. It's really well thought architecture and has had iterations of refactoring. (I think the webviews / javascript is a bit of a mess though)
I suggest you have a look at this - it took my tech lead a couple of weeks to be comfortable with this.
https://github.com/ging/social_stream/wiki/Social-Stream-Base-database-schema
WRT communityengine - I abandoned this over 4 years ago.
https://github.com/jdp-global/communityengine/commit/31f9b267706157a63bfc103a290bd6e3d874066a
Any platform you choose needs to have a focus on APIs / web services.
I have recently started a new job in a company that depends heavily in an application developed with Apple Web Objects.
It happens that this company does not have a way to make automated tests whenever a new update is received, weather with bug fixes or new features.
We have no access to the code since it is a proprietary application.
My idea is to develop a suite of test cases to allow us to do regression testing through the GUI.
I have looked for tools for this, but could not find anything capable of "seeing" which components are in the GUI.
Before I arrived to the company, other people had already tried with HP LoadRunner with no success. I tried with AutoIt 3.0 just to check if it would recognize the fields, but also without success.
Anyone with experience testing such kind of application?
Which tools do you think that could fit for this purpose?
I appreciate your opinion.
Thank you!
Bruno
After some research I found a few good solutions for such problem. I came down to two solutions. Both of them are image based "which means it can "see" the user interface, just as the human eye does".
Proprietary solution
http://www.testplant.com/
Open source solution
httpp://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/sikuli
Hope this can help others in the future.
I would like to know if you could share some (trusted) sources of information (books, URLs) that you consider the most relevant for learning Windows Installer. They could be for starting on this technology or for an advanced or professional level of knowledge.
Where can a future deployment engineer start and where can he/she go to keep on the right direction (step by step)?
I'm obviously biased but I think my blog and the WiX toolset are good ways to learn:
http://robmensching.com/blog
http://wix.sf.net (click on the Manual or Tutorial links on the right)
Some people like Phil Wilson's "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" but I never read it. I learned straight out of the MSI SDK.
I did 7 years of writing InstallScript installers before ever picking up MSI. While there is a huge difference between procedural script-driven imperative installs and data driven declarative installs, they both do the same fundemental thing: deploy software.
I became an MSI Expert but studying everything I could on the domain, writing LOTS of installs and by blogging for 7 years and answering over 4,400 posts on the InstallShield community forums. The only way to go in my book is to have been there and done that.
So the first step in your quest should be to understand the Windows Platform and related technologies very thoroughly. These evolve over the years but you should get a decent understanding of:
Fundamentals
Registry
FileSystem
NTFS
ACL's
DLL Types ( Win32, COM, .NET Assembly)
Win32 API
.NET Base Class Libraries
Service Control Manager Drivers ODBC
SQL IIS Active Directory ( GPO, LDAPand so on )
Global Assembly Cache
WinSxS Cache
DLL Hell
Good and Bad Installer Behavior
The second step is
Tools
Now let's start to writing installs. As Leslie ( Easter I assume ) said in another answer, pick a tool and learn how to use it to accomplish the above things. But don't stop there, as soon as you can go to the next step.
MSI
Start digging deep down into how your tool is working behind the scenes as soon as you can. Just as you can write C# in .NET and look at the IL with ILDASM, learn to use ORCA and see what is happening. Read the MSI SDK. Yes, it's rough and cryptic but I spent 3 months commuting beween DC and TX and I spent at least 16 hours a week traveling away from internet connections but nothing except the SDK to read. Read it, know it, live it... the cryptic help topics will eventually start to click and become second nature.
And finally, read my blog: DeploymentEngineering.com and every other blog you can find.
There is not a simple answer. The primary reason is that most install developers use a specific tool which in turn hides the bulk of Windows Installer behavior. While it would be nice if those developers had an in-depth knowledge of Windows Installer, that's not the case.
My suggestion would be as follows:
Focus on a specific tool. Many of the development environments offer a trial period and some are free. The on-line help for these tools plus the act of building some sample packages will be a useful process.
If practical, consider taking a training class for the tool. I know Flexera sells their basic and advanced InstallShield course manuals. They are a bit over-priced, but it does include need-to-know Windows Installer specifics. The problem you'll run into is that most documentation is specific to the tool without explaining a lot of the connectivity to Windows Installer.
You'll need the Windows Installer SDK -- in addition to the help file, there are some interesting tools and VBScript scripts. Orca is one tool that is included with the SDK and there are similar tools on the Internet (SuperOrca, InstEd, etc.). The SDK is not a great read but it is a great reference. As you come across specific questions regarding Windows Installer use the SDK help file to understand the deeper internals.
Google 'windows installer blog'. You probably don't want to hear that, but there are many great blogs available that cover many bits and pieces of Windows Installer. Make sure you pick up the Windows Installer Team blog.
No matter what path you choose, you'll find learning Windows Installer to be a hands-on process. I hope this helps!
I'm also biased, but this might be helpful. I recently revisited WiX for a real-world Windows Installer project and wrote up my solution which ultimately plugged into a continuous integration server.
The steps in the article take you through using WiX, localizing the MSI, and creating a bootstrapper for installing any prerequisites.
For learning, Tramontana's tutorial WiX helped me a lot.
A nice little blog post about how to debug custom actions is WiX and DTF: Debug a Managed Custom Action and how to generate an MSI log.
Being a programmer who likes all things terminal (like Vim and the GNU tools), I've finally met my match. The company I work for has decided to move from an in-house developed report generator to the Cognos suite.
We have had some informal meetings/workshops regarding the process of creating reports in Cognos, but I can't really make it stick on my non-GUI brain.
Does anyone know of any nice introductions or tutorial style documents explaining how to create projects in the Framework Manager and reports in Report Studio?
Better practice your mouse-moving muscles. :)
I came across this presentation, it is for Reportnet which is a pre-cursor to Cognos 8 but it is high-level enough to give you an accurate overview of how stuff works in Cognos.
There's a lot of content on IBM Developerworks
I really think you will like the old Cognos Multimedia Knowledge Base. They have stopped developing content for it (last C8 content is for version 8.1) but for an intro it will serve you well. Look at the Reportnet Stuff too, it is older but you will get a feel for "how stuff works" in Cognos.