Time Cockpit Blog - Philipp Aumayr

We are happy to announce that time cockpit won the first place in the EuroCloud.Austria "startup" category. time cockpit will therefore compete in the European Awards.  Read more ...

So today finally came that day, we put our first steps into moving to SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 for our offline database. I was delayed by a day by introducing a new way of managing references to third party components in our build system because I didn't want to replace the Version for the assembly in every project file. How I did that is the content of another blog post though.  Read more ...

The other day, a friend of mine asked me for a list containing the time he began work, when he went home, the hours he spent working and the seconds he was on break. At first I thought about implementing a python script to do it, but it turns out that our custom query language, TCQL, has enough power built-in to do it. We can therefore solve this by creating a list definition.  Read more ...

Even though our core dev team is quite small, time cockpit's code base has grown quite a bit. It has grown in such a way, that having all of the code in one solution file and working with it from a day-to-day basis is not a feasible solution. As we have three different areas we work on, Data Layer (DL), Signal Trackers (ST) and the User Interface (UI) itself, we have created seperated solutions for each area. This would work fine just as it is, but the problem is, that ST depends on DL and the UI depends on the ST and DL Layers.  Read more ...

We have been experimenting with automated testing of our services against windows azure lately. Our goal was to deploy a service in the build process, run a unit test, and then undeploy the process. Assuming that you have a hosted service ready (something.cloudapp.net) and a solution with a unit test running locally against a service (running locally, when executing the unit test, there are a few steps one needs to take in order to test against an azure-deployed instance of this.  Read more ...

Lately we had a customer with a corrupted local database. Various source on the internet revealed that his is mostly related to power outs and blue screens. For time cockpit it becomes apparent when neither the signal tracker nor the time cockpit UI is able to start.  Read more ...

After having released time cockpit 1.0, we decided to finally upgrade to Team Foundation Server 2010. The upgrade seemed to have worked without any problem and day-to-day work continued as normal with checkins, branching and merging working at least as good as before. If you read of the changes between TFS 2008 and TFS 2010 (here) you may have noticed that TFS Build 2010 is based on WorkFlow 4.0 (WF4).  Read more ...

In case you are stumbling across a problem where your build does not succeed because the result file for code analysis cannot be found (Unable to read Code Analysis output report. Make sure that the directory is writable (default is the project output directory) be sure to not have any <CodeAnalysisLogFile> entries in your project build files.  Read more ...

Today we had a potential customer having difficulites with the excel export. I agree that there are some rough edges and therefore some more explanation of how the excel export works: Basically there are two variants of exports: Templated and direct. Internally this corresponds to time cockpit reading an exisiting template or creating a default template from the entity type that is to be exported. Therefore I will only explain the templated version, because the non-templated version works the same, just that time cockpit generates a template for you instead of you specifying the template.  Read more ...