Employee Blogs


  • Running mklink in NAnt
    Since there is not an executable for mklink , it took me a minute to figure a good solution to running mklink as a target in my build script. The NAnt has an exec task that is used for running command line targets, but it requires an executable as its target. The command shell works in this situation, so I just need to exec the command shell, and have it execute mklink as its target. Here is my NAnt target: <exec program="cmd" commandline="/c mklink /d mobile\source\CustomControllers customizations\Controllers"/>
  • 02-05-2010, 1:10 PM by styson to Sam Tyson
    0 Comments 25 Views
  • Carrier – Customizing Your Response Emails
    Out of the box Dovetail Carrier is very good at receiving emails and allowing you create business functionality which can react to incoming messages. There is a flip side to receiving emails. Sending them. This post will explain how the Email Agent extension uses templates to send email notifications. First we need to explore what information your template will have available to it. We’ll start by setting the stage. Real World Scenario In the Email Agent extension. When an email is received by your company’s support account the New Case Support...
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  • 02-03-2010, 12:33 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    0 Comments 51 Views
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  • Transitioning Beyond 255 Transitions
    In Clarify, Logistics and Quality both use transitions to determine how a request moves from one condition to another. To change a condition, a transition must be defined between the two conditions for that part request type. To restrict access to critical part operations, you can administer permissions according to privilege classes. In complex installations, the number of transitions across both business areas can easily reach the imposed limit of 256 transitions. This limitation can truly impose headaches when the transitions cannot be accurately...
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  • 01-29-2010, 5:49 PM by styson to Sam Tyson
    0 Comments 41 Views
  • Dovetail is hiring a .NET Developer
    We're expanding the development team on our line of existing products. You'll be working on a small team that develops applications for large businesses using some of the latest technology. You will be involved in all aspects of solution development, including analysis, design, development, testing, documentation, and support. We’re looking for a software developer with demonstrable C# (preferably .NET 2.0 or later) and HTML/CSS experience (ASP.NET MVC is a plus). Any experience with test-driven development or automated unit testing in general is...
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  • 01-29-2010, 12:16 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 129 Views
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  • More On Dovetail Carrier RuleSets
    I wanted to discuss RuleSets in more detail this time diving deeper into a couple of topics I pulled out of Creating Your First Carrier Extension because they were too advanced for an introduction. RuleSets Have Context Your conditions and actions need a way to inspect the message they are evaluating. This is accomplished via the RuleContext object with is give to each condition and action being invoked by the RuleSet. Everytime Carrier starts executing your RuleSet it creates a new RuleSetContext object and puts the message being processed into...
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  • 01-28-2010, 2:24 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    1 Comments 101 Views
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  • Creating Your First Carrier Extension
    Extensions are the heart of Dovetail Carrier. The application itself does nothing unless there is an extension present. This makes it important to understand how to create your own extensions. This guide will take you through creating a brand new extension and having it subscribe to one of the core Carrier messages IncomingEmailMessage . Create The Extension Project The first thing we are going to do is add a project to the extensions solution included with Carrier. Before you can do this you’ll need to unzip the \developer\extensions-source.zip...
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  • 01-28-2010, 10:48 AM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    2 Comments 164 Views
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  • Using jQuery to check all CheckBoxes in an iframe
    In Dovetail Admin, there are a few pages where there is an option to check or uncheck a list of checkbox controls that are in an iframe. The Select All and Unselect All buttons perform the action, and using jQuery the codes becomes really simple and efficient. The code that the buttons use is shared, and the true/false value is passed in to the function to check or uncheck the boxes. The old code gets the iframe, gets all of the input fields, and then loops through all of the input fields. As it loops, if the field type is a checkbox , then the...
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  • 01-21-2010, 12:03 PM by styson to Sam Tyson
    1 Comments 238 Views
  • Configuring Topshelf Using A StructureMap Container
    At Dovetail we use StructureMap a lot. Lately we’ve also been using Topshelf a lot too. This post takes a look at how you can marry these two technologies together. We will be using the StrucutreMap container to configure which services get started by Topshelf at runtime. Simple Services Let’s start simple. We need a way to identify which configured types want to get configured to be spun up by Topshelf. To accomplish this I created an interface called ISimpleService which includes only the Start and Stop methods that Topshelf uses to manage the...
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  • 01-20-2010, 3:32 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    1 Comments 665 Views
  • Controlling Application Lifetime In Topshelf
    One of Topshelf’s best features is the ability to easily host one or more services running side by side. In this post we will create a Topshelf service which will shut down the application. Lets take a look at how it is done. Coordinating the Service Let’s create a fake Health Monitoring service which will, sometime in the future, tell Topshelf to shut the application down. The Topshelf hook for controlling the state of all the services it is hosting is a type called IServiceCoordinator . Here is the code for our health monitor. public class HealthMonitoringService...
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  • 01-20-2010, 2:16 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    2 Comments 1113 Views
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  • Clarify Technical Consultant posting
    For any of you Clarify peeps out there looking for a gig, there’s a Clarify Technical Consultant available at IDC Technologies in Silicon Valley. Requirements: 4-5 years in the following amdocs modules Clarify Application: amdocs crm, clarify classic client, call center application, clear support application, clarify schema, clarify deployment in 3-tier environment tuxedo VB 6 Minimum 4-5 years of experience in Clarify enhancements Understanding the customer requirements Enhancements and testing Note: This isn’t a position at Dovetail, and I don’t...
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  • 01-07-2010, 9:37 AM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 429 Views
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  • Clock – A Super Simple Carrier Extension
    Let’s set aside TwitterAgent for a bit and create the simplest extension to Dovetail Carrier possible, a timepiece, a clock, a chronometer of sorts. The intent of this post is to document in one place all the pieces required to create a Carrier Extension. The Marker For now we need to mark the assembly with an attribute announcing it as a Carrier extension. [assembly: CarrierExtension] You just need to put this code somewhere but it usually goes in your AssemblyInfo.cs file. The Message We first need to create the message we’ll be publishing and...
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  • 12-16-2009, 5:51 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    1 Comments 282 Views
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  • Customizing Dovetail Carrier - Consuming Messages With Rule Sets
    The next step in our plan to implement a Twitter version of Email Agent using Dovetail Carrier is to consume the direct messages coming from Twitter which we published last time . Message consumers basically…er, well they consume messages. The beauty of the message bus is that we have the ability to subscribe many consumers to the types of messages which we publish. Dovetail Carrier provides a way to compose your message consumers by assembling a set of conditions and actions called RuleSets. This RuleSet we’ll be examining will investigate an incoming...
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  • 12-10-2009, 4:55 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    1 Comments 257 Views
  • Customizing Dovetail Carrier - Creating and Publishing Messages
    Previously we made a plan to go get Twitter direct messages and publish them into the Dovetail Carrier message bus. Thankfully the Twitter API is pretty simple but there are a few things to worry about. We need to listen to Twitter for direct messages. Transforming and publishing the direct message into the message bus. Host your Twitter polling and publishing service with Carrier. First Things First This is not a cookbook post. I don’t describe each step along the way that I took to create a Carrier Twitter extension. That said I hope to provide...
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  • 12-07-2009, 2:05 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    2 Comments 1190 Views
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  • Dovetail / Clarify Happy Hour : Massachusetts Edition
    While I’m in Massachusetts next week, we’re sponsoring a get-together for our Dovetail and Clarify friends. Wednesday, December 16th from 5:30 - 8:00 at John Harvard's Brewpub in Framingham, MA . Drinks and appetizers are on us. It’s an informal evening, talking Dovetail and Clarify, technology, and meeting like-minded people, all while sharing a few pints. RSVP to the event through meetup.com: http://www.meetup.com/DovetailHappyHour/ Looking forward to seeing you there!   Click here to check out The Dovetail / Clarify Happy Hour Meetup!
  • 12-07-2009, 1:33 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 190 Views
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  • Customizing Dovetail Carrier
    Kevin has started his first in a series of posts around customizing Dovetail Carrier . Good stuff! I’m looking forward to the rest of his series.
  • 12-07-2009, 11:37 AM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 211 Views
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  • Customizing Dovetail Carrier – Making A Plan
    Dovetail Carrier facilitates the creation of an enterprise message bus where messages can be produced and more importantly consumed. We have included a framework for creating sets of rules that act as consumers of messages coming into the system. I will be doing a series of posts around creating custom extensions for Carrier. The goal of these posts is to educate you and to force me to shine a light on the Carrier customization story in order find the rough edges begging to be smoothed out. Here is what we are going to cover. Making A Plan (you...
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  • 12-04-2009, 5:56 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    4 Comments 300 Views
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  • Thank You Mass Transit Team
    I just wanted to extend a thank you from Dovetail and myself to the Mass Transit project team of Chris Patterson and Dru Sellers for the great framework they put together and the excellent attention and support that they give to the community of users around the project. A few weeks ago we went live at a customer site with a product that uses Mass Transit and so far things are going very well.
  • 12-01-2009, 12:44 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    0 Comments 255 Views
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  • Removing an iframe by using AJAX
    One of our core products at Dovetail Software is our classic ASP application, Dovetail Agent. This application has been in production for many years, and is very stable and reliable. However, since it is a classic ASP application, there is a lot of room for improvement. I recently upgraded the Notification feature of the application. Dovetail Agent is a web application that has a main page (the console), and notifications need to be delivered to users automatically, without the users having to find them manually. In the previous releases of Dovetail...
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  • 11-25-2009, 11:53 AM by styson to Sam Tyson
    0 Comments 208 Views
  • Adding a Custom Dialog To Your Wix Installer
    Recently I made the move to Wix3 for a couple of projects and I have been quite happy. One of the things that has been simplified is adding a a custom step into the installer process. I’ll leave the heavy lifting of how to insert the custom dialog to Jan Schepens’ post Making a custom setup dialog using WiX 3.0 . He tells you how to customize your UI layout and insert a new dialog into the process. Read this post it explains it well. Neil Sleightholm has a similar post Customised UI’s For Wix that is about removing dialogs from the layout. I’m going...
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  • 11-04-2009, 5:44 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    2 Comments 1006 Views
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  • Simplification
    Just replaced this VB (shudder) code ' Build up additional info string using ' research time as formatted string addnl_info = "Elapsed time = " t_long = research_time If t_long > 86400 Then t_long2 = t_long \ 86400 Else t_long2 = 0 End If t_long = t_long - t_long2 * 86400 addnl_info = addnl_info & VB6.Format(t_long2, "000") & " " If t_long > 3600 Then t_long2 = t_long \ 3600 Else t_long2 = 0 End If t_long = t_long - t_long2 * 3600 addnl_info = addnl_info & VB6.Format(t_long2, "00") &...
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  • 11-03-2009, 4:35 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    0 Comments 268 Views
  • A week of Monospace and Innotech
    I spent last week at the Monospace conference, which was held concurrently with the annual Innotech conference here in Austin. Monospace This was the first year for Monospace , and it was fantastic. Scott Bellware did a great job of organizing the conf, bringing in top notch attendees, and providing fun after-hours activities as well. Miguel de Icaza (founder of the Mono project ) attended, along with a good chunk of his team. There were plenty of local folks (including a few of us from Dovetail), folks from Microsoft, as well as a bunch of international...
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  • 11-02-2009, 2:00 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    2 Comments 411 Views
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  • Basic Web Application Loading With JMeter
    I needed to load test one of our web applications today. Load testing is not something I am too familiar with. A search turned up a list of open source load testing tools. At the top of the list was Apache JMeter which I decided to gave a shot based on the awesomeness of the Apache project. I am not quite blown away but I was able to get a load test up and going in about 15 minutes which makes me very very happy. Here is what I did to create a load tester for our Dovetail Seeker web search service . Get It Download JMeter Extract it to a directory...
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  • 10-23-2009, 6:10 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    2 Comments 591 Views
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  • Dovetail Expands Marketing Group
    I am pleased to announce that Lisa McDonald has joined Dovetail as Marketing Communications Manager based in our Austin, TX office. Lisa brings to Dovetail experience in various Marketing activities and will be managing initiatives to extend Dovetail's presence in the CRM market space, creation of product marketing content, and interaction with customers and partners. Lisa is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a Masters of Science in Technology Commercialization.
  • 10-22-2009, 8:23 AM by rcoleman to Rusty Coleman, VP Sales & Marketing
    0 Comments 261 Views
  • Dovetail at CCNG Dallas Event
    Dovetail will be sponsoring and presenting at the upcoming CCNG event in Dallas on Wednesday, October 21st at New Benefits office location. For CCNG members attending, we look forward to seeing you there. For others interested in attending check the details at http://www.ccng.com/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4555 . This is a great networking opportunity. Rusty
  • 10-14-2009, 4:30 PM by rcoleman to Rusty Coleman, VP Sales & Marketing
    2 Comments 380 Views
  • What Is Under The Hood In Dovetail Mobile?
    Dovetail Mobile is our first shipping ASP.NET MVC based application. Because this is a newer technology one of our customers asked for some guidance on customizing the application. The following is a distillation of that guidance which I hope might come in handy for future Mobile customers. Customizing Dovetail Mobile (Agent Lite) Dovetail Mobile and its desktop skinned alter ego Agent Lite is a ASP.Net MVC 1.0 application. There are lots of reading and tutorial resources available that will translate directly to understanding how this type of application...
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  • 10-13-2009, 4:37 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    1 Comments 400 Views
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