Slow Train Software Blog

I’m happy to announce that MockingBird v2 has been released by the project coordinator Santosh Benjamin. What is MockingBird? Well I’ll let Santosh explain it with his elevator pitch for MockingBird:

MockingBird is a tool-set for mocking web services.

Consider the scenario where you are given the WSDL for a third-party web-service but no functioning system is available yet (it may be a brand new service or perhaps dev/site licenses are being negotiated). You need to get on with development right now. What do you code against? If you are into TDD & MockObjects you may look to mock up an interface corresponding to the WSDL and develop against that. But what if you ‘don’t do’ TDD & Mocks? Or it may be that you are maintaining/enhancing an existing system that wasn’t coded against interfaces so mocking may not be possible. Or what if you are a BizTalk developer? You cannot mock/inject dependencies into your orchestrations and other components (well, except for pipeline components, but thats another story)!!

Next, imagine that you are setting up a build server and multiple environments (DEV, TEST, UAT etc). But the vendor says you can only have one license for their software. Now how do you run DEV, TEST, UAT in parallel with different data sets? Or you may have more than one license, but what if that service has maintenance schedules that clash with your build? Your build server is then completely exposed to something you don’t control.

Being able to set up complete mock services is invaluable in these scenarios. Unfortunately there aren’t many tools available to help with this so we have to resort to manually coding mock services. MockingBird aims to make it easy and quick to build configurable mock services.

We use MockingBird in order to do rapid development for BizTalk and also to help create repeatable test cases to comprehensively test BizTalk applications. Since we use MockingBird extensively ourselves we were pleased to contribute some code to the v2 release, including an option to use XSLT to dynamically generate a web service response.

It’s a fantastic tool for BizTalk development so I’d encourage you to install it and try it out. Alternatively have a look at the videos that Santosh has produced here

We are pleased to announce that Slow Train Software has become a Microsoft Certified Partner. We specialise in developing solutions on the Microsoft platform and becoming a certified partner will help us deliver more value to our customers. For more information see the Microsoft technologies we use and our case studies.

Slow Train Software was delighted to be involved in the Lambay races organised by Howth Yacht Club last weekend. The weather in Dublin was fantastic, lots of sunshine and a nice northeasterly breeze made for a great days sailing. We provided GPS trackers to each boat in the Howth 17 Footer class and used TackTracker to create an online replay of their race around Lambay Island. The Howth 17 Footer was designed in 1897 and is the oldest racing one-design keelboat class in the world. The class rules of this fleet are designed to protect the heritage of the Howth 17s.

A boat design 113 years old, GPS trackers and the internet; a great example of old and new technology complementing each other. You can see the replay of the race below (click Fullscreen for the best experience) or click here to view it on the TackTracker site.

We are pleased to announce that for 2010 Slow Train Software will be a sponsor of the Irish Windsurfing Association Slalom Series. This year the slalom series consists of 5 events all around Ireland between now and October. We are delighted to be involved with a series that is growing in popularity and where the racing is very exciting. Part of our sponsorship will be to use our experience in software development and GPS technology to create replays of the racing that will then be published online. We will be using the TackTracker software developed in Australia to do this. The first days racing of round 1 in Newtownards is now available to view here. This event was a trial run of the technology and for Round 2 in Kerry on May 22/23 we will have more competitors involved and replays of all the action. GPS technology has great potential to help with the organisation and enjoyment of sailing events so it’s an exciting area to be involved in.

Microsoft have recently announced a substantial price reduction for all of the services that make up Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) as well as increasing the storage space for each account to a massive 25 GB. While this will be great news for companies already using BPOS with a large number of users, we feel it’s even better for the smaller companies that are considering making the move. The minimum requirement for using BPOS is 5 users with the BPOS Standard Suite and this now is priced at 5 users x €8.52 / month = €42.60 / month = €511.20 /year.

This is less than the price of a laptop to provide your company with enterprise grade email and a SharePoint site, or to put if differently much less than it would cost to recover data on a laptop whose hard drive has failed. Many small businesses do not have the time and resources to implement best practice IT infrastructure and then they suffer hugely when hit by unexpected events like the theft of laptops or viruses. Some studies estimate that up to 50% of businesses that suffer a major data loss go out of business. BPOS combined with a prudent backup strategy can minimize the risk of catastrophic data loss.

These price reductions really puts BPOS within the grasp of small businesses. We have experience migrating businesses email to BPOS and can provide advice on using the full suite, in particular SharePoint, to full advantage.

When you first set up Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) there is a single administrator account set up named admin. It is recommended that you leave this account in place and create new user accounts and then assign administrator rights as required. However you often want to create an email address of the form admin@yourdomain.com and forward this mail to whoever handles it. BPOS allows you to set up alternate email addresses for each user, however you cannot use the name of an exisiting user in any of your domains. This causes a problem as it clashes with the name of the default admin user. The admin user does not have a mailbox associated with it by default and creating one would needlessly use up one of your licenses. Trying to rename the original admin user or make any modifications to that account also fails as the user does not have any services assigned to it. The solution is simply to delete the original admin user, as long as you have at least one other user who will be an administrator as well. Then you can set up admin@yourdomain.com to be an alternate email for the user who will receive these emails. Deleting the original admin account did have have any unpleasant side effects as far as we can tell. If we run into any problems I will update this blog post.

We have recently become a reseller for Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) from Microsoft Online Services and have some clients interested in adopting it.

For anyone who doesn’t know what BPOS is yet Tom’s Hardware has a great review that explains it better than I possibly could:

Microsoft’s BPOS: Cloud Computing’s Silver Lining?

Since we should practice what we preach when selling this to clients we decided it was time to migrate to BPOS ourselves. We genuinely believe in the benefits that hosted services and cloud computing can bring to small to medium sized businesses. When we formed Slow Train Software we made a decision to use hosted services where possible so that we’re not tied down to one location and to save costs on servers and network infrastructure. We’ve used hosted Exchange Server, SharePoint and source control to run our business right from the start. These solutions have worked  great for us, but since our Exchange and SharePoint hosting were from different providers there were some small integration problems between them. BPOS we hoped would eliminate these and give us extra features such as Live Meeting.

The migration went very smoothly and was a lot easier than I expected. The BPOS documentation is excellent and covers. For anyone about to do the same I’d suggest one thing:

If you are intending on registering your businesses domain with BPOS (as 90% of people will) then complete the registering of the domain first before you start setting up users or anything else on BPOS. Registering the domain involves temporarily setting up a random DNS entry to prove that you have ownership of the domain, so you need to be able to modify a CNAME record before you go near the MX records. If you don’t register the domain first all your users and SharePoint site collections will have the form yourcompany.microsoftonline.com instead of yourcompany.com. This can be changed later, but it is easier to avoid it happening in the first place.

The total migration was done in a couple of hours, including setting up our laptops, desktops and mobile phones to sync with BPOS as well. We’ve been using it day to day for a week now and our experiences so far have been very positive. This is just version 1 of cloud computing and there will be a lot more features to come in the coming years. By getting onboard early you can be in a position to take advantage of this.

I recently recorded a podcast and screencast with Ronan Geraghty of Microsoft featuring the SpeedPlay software we developed for Velocitek. You can see and hear the result of this here. Microsoft was interested in highlighting the software as an example of a successful consumer product that uses WPF and also because of its compatibility with Windows 7. We recorded the demo and screencast using the Windows 7 Beta and it was great to see the software, drivers and hardware all work without a problem.

In my previous post I announced the release of Velocitek SpeedPlay version 1. Here I would like to mention some of the technical details of the implementation.

WPF

The UI is implemented 100% using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). There are not that many consumer applications out there that use WPF and being a relatively new technology it was a bit of a gamble to use it. However we feel that that gamble has more than paid off. WPF has allowed us to develop a much more innovative and easy to user UI than would be possible otherwise. Despite a steep learner curve at the beginning and a few issues I believe that using WPF has reduced the overall development time and resulted in a higher quality product.

Third Party Controls

Although the market for WPF third party controls is not as mature as for older technologies there are a number of innovative products out there. We used the blendables controls from IndentityMine and the WPF controls from Infragistics. Both are excellent products that I would have no problem recommending.

Microsoft Virtual Earth

SpeedPlay integrates with the Microsoft Virtual Earth servers to provide background maps for the replay.

Hardware

SpeedPlay integrates with Velocitek’s GPS hardware devices. FTDI chips are installed on the hardware. The application communicates with the them using libraries supplied by FTDI.

InstallShield

A WPF application requires an up to date version of the .NET Framework (we released using .NET Framework 3.5 SP1). InstallShield was used to create an msi installer that also installs the .NET Framework, device drivers, Java and a third party application.

We are very pleased to announce the release of Version 1 of Velocitek SpeedPlay. This is an application we have developed for Velocitek, an innovative and leading manufacturer of GPS equipment for dingy and sportboat racers. From their press release:

Paia, Maui (13 October, 2008)- Three years ago Velocitek released the world’s first GPS sail training tool, creating what has now become a whole new instrument category. Today Velocitek is shaking things up again by releasing its own race replay application called Velocitek SpeedPlay.

Velocitek SpeedPlay is fully integrated with Velocitek GPS devices to make the process of getting GPS data off a group of GPS devices and formatted into a replay as fast and convenient as possible. SpeedPlay allows USB hubs to be used to download GPS data from up to 21 Velocitek GPS devices in one batch. Once the data has been downloaded race start and end times can be specified with a single mouse click and marks can be added using a convenient drag and drop interface.

As an added bonus, when connected to the internet, detailed, accurate map backgrounds are automatically imported into race replays from Microsoft Virtual Earth, providing an interested geographical context for any event. To learn more about Velocitek SpeedPlay, please visit the Velocitek website, velocitek.com

This has been a technically very challenging project, but ultimately a very rewarding one. Early in the project we decided to take a risk and develop it using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), still quite a new technology yet to be adopted mainstream. We feel that this gamble has paid off, allowing us to create an innovative and easy to use user interface.

Previously large yacht races, such as the America’s cup and Volvo Ocean Race, would have bespoke solutions for generating online replays of their events. For clubs and smaller events the only solution was to use a combination of various programs in a time-consuming manner. This video produced by Velocitek demonstrates the ease with which replays can now be created using SpeedPlay and Velocitek’s excellent GPS hardware: