Time Cockpit Blog - Rainer Stropek

In January, we finally migrated all our production databases in Microsoft Azure from the old web/business-edition-model to new v12 database servers. Additionally, we now manage all our database clusters in Azure Database Pools. Although this change will not influence you as a time cockpit user directly, you indirectly have some important benefits.  Read more ...

On January, 25th the first IT-Visions information day has taken place in Linz. Roman Schacherl, Raphael Schwarz and Rainer Stropek were talking about what's new in .NET, ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2015, in Microsoft Azure, in mobile development and Universal Windows Platform.  Read more ...

Although software is intangible, it ages. As a consequence, every software company will at some point need to make significant investments to redesign and modernize existing applications. In such projects, costs and available resources are important for design decisions. Without a design-to-cost approach, redesign projects often are stopped before they are finished. Frankenstein software is the result. Read more about how to use the design-to-cost approach to protect against Frankenstein.  Read more ...

This month our main focus was adding responsive design to our HTML5 client. Our goal is to make time cockpit's web client usable on phone, tablets and in desktop browsers. We have not reached our final goal yet but we have made significant progress this month. Try it and tell us what you think.  Read more ...

The software business has been changing at a daunting speed in the last years. Technologies, programming languages, frameworks, project management approaches, etc. we use today have changed so much compared to e.g. five years ago. This is especially true if you are developing on Microsoft's technology stack (e.g. C#, .NET, Visual Studio, TypeScript, Azure) like we do. During workshops and trainings, I often get asked how I find the time to learn all these new technologies. In this blog article I would like to share some thoughts about this topic with you.  Read more ...

Many of our customers use Node.js to extend time cockpit. They automate routine tasks, implement interfaces to other systems, or even write powerful web apps on top of time cockpit's OData web api. We have good news for you: TypeScript's new async/await feature makes your life much easier.  Read more ...

Time cockpit is a great platform for managing time- and project-related data. Microsoft’s Power BI shines when it comes to data visualization and interactive dashboards. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate both systems to get the best of both worlds? For this month’s newsletter, we have created a sample showing how simple it is to connect both systems’ web APIs. Watch the video in the blog article to find out how the integration sample works. Additionally, the blog article contains links to the sample code. Feel free to use it as a starting point for exporting your time cockpit data to Power BI.  Read more ...

Office 365 makes it quite easy to create add-ins using HTML and JavaScript. Time cockpit also offers an easy-to-use API for these web technologies. In this blog article I walk you through a short sample that demonstrates how to create an Outlook calendar add-in accessing time cockpit's project database.  Read more ...

Today I will do a session about Docker on Azure for software developers at NRWConf 2015 in Wuppertal (Germany). For that talk I updated my slides and samples so they run with latest version of ASP.NET 5 (beta 7). Here are the updated slides and a link to the sample code.  Read more ...

Data protection is an important topic when it comes to cloud computing. This is true especially for customers in Europe. Recently, discussions about whether cloud services can be considered as safe for European customers got fueled by a critical statement of the advisor to Europe's top court about the Safe Harbor agreement. In this article I want to describe the current situation in Azure concerning EU data protection laws.  Read more ...