Lotushints

1. Your direct superior believes unit tests can replace technical documentation
2. No matter how convincing your arguments are, project manager is always right.
3. There is no sign of a bug tracking software.
3a. In a chance there is, it is not used.
3b. If it is used, it is used in totally wrong purpose.
4. Doxygen is yet another open source project you don’t need.
5. No way in hell you are getting training in software development.

Lately I tried to integrate some C# application with Lotus Notes application data. Hence, I needed to display view contents in some way.

Naturally I googled for solution on how to display view contents as JSON and came across Domino URL Cheat sheet. Even though I lately decided to go with XML display (mostly because you have XMLDataSource in ASP.net), I still found it useful and with loads of great tips I might use in the future.

Before I begin, let me explain that I am a big Mercurial and Visual studio fan. Sure, there could be some improvements made in both, but all in all they are a decent product, which I gladly use on daily basis.
Recently, however, I stumbled upon a nasty problem. I had to make some modifications to an internal solution for tracking equipment, which is web based. I edited the content, tested it locally and performed a publish action…

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Last week I got notification of new Microsoft product release. Intrigued by some screenshots I decided to download and install Webmatrix. For those that cba to go to official site, Webmatrix is a combo of upgraded Visual studio WebDeveloper, IIS 7.5 express and MSDE. What is a big plus is that it knows kung-fu… Not really. But it knows PHP as well, which is nice.

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Lately I needed to parse format that Cisco uses for specifying transfer masks and route patterns to an array of telephone numbers a user could choose from. I wrote a neat javascript function that traverses the string and does what needed. I even wrote a neat recursive function that displayed the numbers in HTML select field.
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Lately I have been marked as a ‘reinventing the wheel’ guy. I don’t object to that. After all, when I see this cool new feature, I just need to see how it was made. And since I am there, I can also test my skills and rewrite it. But is it really that bad to reinvent the wheel?

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Ending up a big project, I was brimming with confidence. The code was well structured, it ran fast despite using external web services and on top of that, it worked on test system. Oh boy, did it work. I should have seen a warning sign there. But no. I let my vanity kick  in and enjoyed the good times. Yes, everything worked. Until…

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Recently, I was working on an agent that used a web service to export data. Now, I don’t know if you noticed, but for some reason, consuming services is way easier in LotusScript than it is in Java. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, you need to import Axis in Java to do anything with a Web service consumer.

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Recently, I had a “privilege” to acquaint myself with numerous small business applications for Windows. First, I would like to state that there is some good software out there and kudos to all of you who deliver it. Unfortunately, such software is in wast minority. However, you can quickly detect such software. Installation process is full of unreasonable demands, requests and limitations.

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Recently we experienced an interesting issue with Sametime Business Card. There was a couple of our users for which business cards stated nothing more but their respective names. Not even an online status.

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