Time Cockpit Blog - Philipp Aumayr

In the current version of time cockpit, there is a bug in the excel exporter when using conditional formatting in an excel template file. Precisely, when using a conditional format that spans a full row or column instead of a sub-region of a worksheet. The root cause of this is in the way that the [usually more than awesome] ClosedXML (http://closedxml.codeplex.com/) library handles ranges with covering all rows or all columns. In some of those cases, ClosedXML tries to apply something to every cell in that (semi-infinite) range.  Read more ...

Time cockpit can work online or offline. All changes are synchronized to a local database for offline use. For the next version (July 2013, 1.14) we have dramatically improved the performance when syncing large amounts of signal data, greatly reducing initial synchronization times for new users or devices.  Read more ...

Recently, Microsoft launched their hosted Team Foundation Service which includes the ability to use customized workflows including custom code activities. Last week, I gave the feature a spin and here’s a few things that I tripped over.  Read more ...

Today one of our customers reported an issue that time cockpit's Silverlight client would not load on his computer. The fabulous thing about this: The customer solved the problem himself AND gave us the root of the cause. We definitely have the best customers in the world.  Read more ...

In the first entry discussing C++ inheritance, I covered how basic inheritance works: A hidden pointer to a virtual function pointer table is used to dispatch to the correct method. I pointed out that the addresses of the objects, no matter how I casted them around stayed the same. Now this was pretty straightforward for single inheritance, but you will see why this becomes quite special with multiple inheritance.  Read more ...

Quite a while ago - still working with Rarebyte - I was designing a class library for game related stuff. Naively ensured that OOP was the only real solution to scaling software, we did a lot of (multiple) inheritance and packed stuff into the library, most of what we never needed anyhow. At one point the question came up on how this was implemented and if we actually knew what this (multiple inheritance especially) meant to the data structures. With self-competence I garbled something about function pointers and tables and a hidden pointer in every object etc. What it meant exactly, I didn't know.  Read more ...

For a Microsoft event we have been hired to do a full-day workshop about news in Visual Studio 2012 for C++ developers. The workshop took place at Microsoft's Innovation Center in Vienna last Friday. In this blog article you find the slides and the samples that I have used in the workshop  Read more ...

In cloud computing scenarios latencies between the application and database server are usually higher compared to an on premise scenario. With the rise of node.js I/O driven web hosts are becoming more familiar and ADO.Net 4.5 aids this by providing Async methods to I/O bound functions.   Read more ...

One of the key benefits of time cockpit is the customizability. A thing that is often requested but unfortunately still a bit difficult is hiding menu items depending on the current user.  Read more ...

Those of you who know me, also know my appreciation for c++. Those of you knowing time cockpit will also know that nearly all of it is written in c#/.net with its service hosting infrastructure running in Windows Azure. There is one particular part of time cockpit that will, at some point in the future, receive a native rewrite and due to the nature of it, storing its data in windows azure is a key requirement. Windows Azure, up to now, does not offer a developer story for C++ development, especially considering access to its storage subsystem. This is where Casablanca comes in to play:  Read more ...