March 26th, 2008
I was one of the lucky few to be a part of the ‘Ondernemen2008‘ Softelligent team at ‘Tour en Taxi’s’ in Brussels, or well at least for one day. It was my job to guide people through two of our new exciting products: Xtravoice and Entity.
First thing I noticed, when arriving at the fair, was how nice and clean our booth was. It was quite a surprise since I’d never seen it before! You can see yourself:
The idea was to have a booth concerning communication integration in a broad way. For this reason we lined up with our colleagues from Intracto who are specialized in web development.
The second thing I saw was that the small Softelligent team was on this fair side by side with some of the big players in the telecom industry. Companies like Proximus, Google, Biptel, Microsoft, … they were all present and we had some interesting talks with them.
The workshop that we had put together with the title: ‘beter communiceren met minder moeite en meer effect’ or ‘communicate with ease’ immediately gives a good indication of the vision and atmosphere at the fair. We talked about e-commerce, cell phone gateways, pbx’es, Call-Me buttons, custom telecom-products and integration with new and existing software.The crowd was quite enthusiastic about it and flooded our booth afterwards.
Overall great fair, a lot of opportunities came forth.Watch out when we hit a fair near you! (B2B Days, Antwerp, June)
Tags: ondernemen 2008
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March 13th, 2008
You can come visit us at the Ondernemen2008 fair in Brussels on March 19 and 20. Softelligent will be introducing its voip solution and give a seminar on the future of communication integration.
For more information about XtraVoice visit our website.
Tags: ondernemen 2008, xtravoice
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March 12th, 2008
“Developers! Developers! Developers!” These words, made famous by an over-excited Steve Ballmer, are starting to live their own life. Microsoft is even dedicating an event to the developers. Besides launching Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008, they are putting the developers in the spotlight. Because they are making the applications & programs that keep the world from crumbling down and grinding to a halt. The heroes are the developers (and not only the men in suits who sell what we make, according to Microsoft)
First product we saw was Windows Server 2008. I think the biggest change is the fact that instead of everything being on by default, now everything is turned off. Every component can be configured as needed, if you need a webserver you only need to install and configure that part you can even drop the interface and work only with the system from a console. An other big improvement being introduced is a very advanced and easy to use virtualisation interface which allows you to get a new server running in no time, easy deploy the same configuration on several systems, analyse your entire farm for point of failurers. For more information you can visit this article on Tom’s Hardware or the homepage on the Microsoft site.
Next up we visited three development sessions. One session quickly went over the new features in Visual Studio 2008, nothing new here. I think the best feature being introduced is being able to target different versions of the framework from one IDE, but everyone knew that already.
The other session was an introduction to the new web development features. Most of the time went to the integration with Ajax and some new tools, like a CSS tool to check how a certain item gets its layout and a new split view to view the markup and design at the same time.
The last session, and the best one we think, was about developing applications for Windows Vista and Office. The Microsoft Synch framework was thrown in aswell. I must say I was quite impressed. WPF really allows us Windows developers to create those nice looking applications that in the past were only available to web developers. Our own AdventureWorks application will definitaly have a frontend using this technology. For more information here’s a link to the VS 2008 homepage.
This pretty much sums it up, we all had a great time and some tasty muffins.
Yannick, Lemmy & Benny
Tags: heroes, microsoft
Posted in Smartasses | 2 Comments »
February 7th, 2008
In a series of posts I (and those interested in joining me) will create an application using Spring.Net and NHibernate as supporting frameworks. Why do I start with this? Because there are a lot of examples out there that don’t go beyond the ‘Hello World’ sample and while everybody is talking about how things should be done, a real-life enterprise ready solution is not available. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying I have the solution for every problem. I just hope that everybody will be able to learn something, including me! One of the key goals will be to use domain-driven design to drive the development backed up with user stories, unit tests, continuous integration,…
I can only give a rough outline of the application for now. It will consist of a web and windows front. These front-ends will communicate via webservices with the back-end powering the business. The AdventureWorks Microsoft sample will be used as the customer who needs to modernize its infrastructure.
That’s all for now, a lot more to come.
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January 29th, 2008
It took us some time but we’re finally up and running. After comparing several blog engines we decided to go for BlogEngine.Net, it was the only one that worked out of the box.
Happy reading!
The Smartass team
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