Chillisoft Blog
 

I’ve been working on an application that uses Habanero and Visual WebGui (VWG) to provide a simple website that lets a department manage a list of facilities. At Chillisoft we use test-driven development to build robust applications, and we attempt to get our business, logic and presentation layer as close to 100% test coverage as possible.

I was writing tests for a section of code that calls through to VWGContext.Current.Session, which effectively allows you to store and retrieve session variables in the same way you do in ASP.Net. The trouble is that Current returns null because no web environment has been launched.
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Use cases are an important part of the communication between a client and a developer, or a user and a business analyst. That much is evident, since they are written in plain English and describe the business process in detail from the user’s point of view.  All this is great except these use cases seem to create a huge administration overhead. What’s that I hear you say? “That’s the Project administrator/co-ordinators job”? No, we don’t have such a luxury! (We chose premium filter coffee and an espresso machine over having a co-ordinator).

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Habanero version 2.3.0 is the most stable and powerful version of Habanero available and the development team believes this version is going to knock the competition off the shelves. On top of a range of performance improvements, bug fixes, dependency inversions and extended test coverage, you’ll get new features like serialisation of BusinessObjects and a bunch of nifty UI tools.

What’s the Big Deal?

What sets Habanero apart from other data or ORM frameworks?
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Learning to use keyboard shortcuts is a double-edged sword.  On one hand, you get fed up with how hard it is to pull off a task and you feel a certain sense of triumph when you find a shorter way of doing a repetitive task.  On the other blade, becoming more efficient in what you do is part of the service to your employment contract.  You’re getting paid to perform a quality service as quickly as you can.

So what then is “the most useful keyboard shortcut you never used”…
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Active Reports provides the XMLDataSource option for sourcing your data from xml.  My knowledge of all its ins and outs is not substantial, but I ran into two significant problems in a recent project which led me towards an alternative, innovative approach.
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Our client required a modification to an existing web solution that displayed confidential results in html format, which could be printed from the results page.  The data was sensitive and was being forged, so we looked at adding a watermark.  This required moving across to using reporting rather than html, so we started building up a report structure.

I was very pleased to find that Active Reports provided a WebViewer control, especially since it gave you the option of either displaying reports with an ActiveX option or with a Adobe Reader option.  My assumption was the latter required extra processing to convert a document to PDF first.  However, the ActiveX option requires the client user to have internet access to download the plugin, whereas the Adobe browser plugin can be installed from a downloadable installer that can be run on any PC.
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I had a system deployed to a client site, and everything was working perfectly. The system administrator at the client site did a few things on the server, and next thing the Reports in the web site that use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services were giving an error.

Nothing had changed that should have affected the site! So, what could be causing the error?

The error in the report viewer was: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

That’s an all too familiar error to anyone that has programmed in .NET and it is always slightly amusing to find it in someone else’s released program. The other day I got one from SQL Server Administrator when I clicked on something in the tree view on the left (just after I had freshly installed Reporting Services). Aha, so they are not infallible! A slight grin etched itself across my face. Well, anyway, the solution was a tried and tested standard Windows solution… Restart the PC. Amazing how often that works with Microsoft stuff hey! But in my case I was getting the error in my application, in a section that I had no control over, so how could I save myself this embarrassment?
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