The Government Digital Service (GDS) has begun to work with local government teams on transforming their online services to use some of the new technology developed by GDS for central government. So far, there have been 2 pilot projects across about 15 councils, focusing on parking permit and older person’s concessionary bus pass services. The aim has been to redevelop these services end-to-end using GDS expertise and the new GOV.UK Verify service. The interesting thing is that GDS has documented[...]

Carrying on from our first post following the results of our developers’ adventures in the most recent ContrOCC hackday, here is the final set of projects: Client Provisions – Julian Alternative storage – Maciej WiX – Matthew DB upgrades with F# – Nathan Generating test data – Nigel New documentation – Steph Automating deployment – Tom G Automating component testing – Tom L Web-based CSV editor – Tomasz A Parsing & Analysing T-SQL – Trevor Julian – Client Provisions As[...]

Last month OCC took part in LocalGovCamp 2015 and the Local Democracy Maker Day fringe event in Leeds. LocalGovCamp is an annual “unconference” where the attendees set the agenda by pitching sessions, building a schedule, and taking part in the sessions that appeal the most to them. To people used to formal conferences, it might sound a little chaotic, but it works incredibly well and results in a highly topical and engaging event. Sessions ranged in topic from Open Data,[...]

Our ContrOCC hackdays give our developers a day to work on tweaks, gripes, improvements, or whole new features of their choosing and then sharing those with the rest of the team. We have plenty of projects to talk about again this year so I have split this post in two; we’ll post the remaining projects soon. Here is the first set: Code analysis – Adam and Tomasz B Database schema documentation via metadata – Alan Upgrade AllTheThings to .NET 4.5[...]

A requirement we hear from many of our Government customers is that a sizable number of their users with sight impairment prefer to have a text size widget on-screen when they browse a website. These accessibility widgets are tough to implement cleanly using HTML and CSS but the advent of CSS preprocessors such as Sass and LESS make the job much easier. In this post we’ll see how we can use Sass to create a text size widget. What we’re[...]

We love visual studio at OCC. It’s an incredible IDE for software and web development and Microsoft put amazing effort into keeping up with the direction developers find themselves moving. In this case we’re talking front end web development and specifically: Gulp.js – a JavaScript-powered automated build system that uses Node to perform the tasks you find yourself doing over and over Sass – a language extending CSS (that is compiled to produce CSS) to give developers more power when[...]

Carrying on from our first post following the results of our developers’ adventures in the most recent ContrOCC hackday, here is the final set of projects: Graphically presenting performance information to the lay developer – Julian Fletcher Cleaning up the developer documentation – Maciej Luszczynski CSV Merger – Matthew Clarke F#/C# – Nathan-Madonna Byers ContrOCC version manager – Nigel Palmer An executable imports/exports specification – Patrick Donkor Improving code integrity checks – Steph Sharp Migration from within the ContrOCC UI[...]

Our ContrOCC hackdays give our developers a day to work on tweaks, gripes, improvements, or whole new features of their choosing and then sharing those with the rest of the team. This year we have so many team members I have split this post in two; we’ll post the remaining projects soon. Here is the first set: Converting the distributed tests config file to XML – Alan Carter Converting ContrOCC tools to use Git – Chris Griggs Visualising the ContrOCC Database – Chris[...]

Jeff Gothelf is the author of Lean UX, a book that plugs into the theory of The Lean Startup and looks at how User Experience design processes fit in with the Lean approach. Jeff was interviewed by Communitech News and described what he believes is the key to building an innovative product or company: Talk to your customers. I mean, really have the humility to listen to your customers. Learn what it is that they love about your product; learn[...]

We’ve already made it to the third of our successful product hackdays, giving our developers a day to work on tweaks, gripes, improvements, or whole new features of their choosing and then sharing those with the rest of the team. The day’s projects Alan – Test scripting improvements I did some prototype work on a new version of our “TPA” test scripting language. I wanted to store a representation of the test objects and commands in the application’s configuration tables[...]

After the success of our first ContrOCC hackday, we’ve decided to hold one every four months, to give the team a day to work on things that they think would make ContrOCC a little nicer in some way, for users or developers. The day’s projects Alan upgraded as many of our Visual Studio solutions as possible to VS 2012.   2012 improvements include better support for working with JavaScript, out-of-the-box support for the NuGet package manager, the long-awaited “collapse all” feature[...]

We recently held the first ContrOCC Developer’s Hackday, which was all about giving the team some time to work on things that would make the product a little nicer for them in some way. For example: A development task or bug that’s getting on their nerves but which isn’t getting scheduled Improving developer tools Experimental development which might or might not work A prototype solution or toy program to demonstrate an interesting idea A spec or mockup for something more[...]

August’s UX Oxford talk was “Research is boring: How we sell it, do it better, and make better use of it.” from Lee McIvor, a freelance user experience designer and the organiser of lightningUX. As user experience designers, we often come up against the misconception that user research is not important, that a design does not need to be fed by research, but that we can take the “genius” design route, assume that we know what we need to know,[...]

Design can be a very subjective matter. All of us have our personal likes and dislikes when it comes to the appearance of the products, tools and websites we use, but it’s important for both the designer and client to set those aside when you’re working on a web design project. Websites are designed for their audience, for the users that the owner is hoping will visit and complete some transaction or task. As part of the user-centred design process,[...]

Microsoft has just announced its entry into the tablet market, the Surface. Designed and manufactured by Microsoft, Surface will launch this Autumn and comes in two models: A more powerful, expensive, thicker & heavier (13.5mm, 903g) one running Windows 8 Pro on an Intel chipset comparable to the latest ultrabooks. This tablet will be able to run demanding desktop applications such as Office, Photoshop and others. An attachable stylus will also be available for handwriting and annotation. A cheaper, more[...]

“The Cloud” is a term that we use to describe a way of hosting and running websites and applications where we ship off our files and databases to whomever we choose and have all the worries of managing the details of hardware, operating systems, networks and datacentres managed for us by them. This way, the specialists at the cloud provider can focus on providing a high quality, scalable platform, and the customer can focus on developing and deploying their website[...]

Debugging inside an SQL Server Trigger can be incredibly difficult, since the data exists only in the scope of that trigger. However, there are a couple of techniques that can help. Raise an error You can output debug data from the Inserted and Deleted tables by converting it to a string via XML as follows: Declare @ErrorInfo varchar(8000) Set @ErrorInfo = Char(13) + 'Inserted: ' + Char(13) + IsNull ((Select * From Inserted FOR XML PATH('')), '') Set @ErrorInfo =[...]

The third of a series of posts introducing handy functions built into SQL Server (2005 and above) to help you include interesting metadata about your SELECT statement’s results. Include row numbers in your SQL SELECT results Partition your SQL SELECT results into groups Rank your SQL SELECT results Rank() and Dense_Rank() If you’d like to rank your SQL SELECT result set by one or more factors then you can use Rank() or Dense_Rank(), which are best demonstrated with an example:[...]

The first of a series of posts introducing handy functions built into SQL Server (2005 and above) to help you include interesting metadata about your SELECT statement’s results. Row_Number() If you’d like to include the row number of the items as they appear in your SELECT result set then the Row_Number function does exactly that. For example: Select SortName, Row_Number() Over (Order By Forename) As Row From T_Person Where Surname = 'Lawson' Would result in: SortName Row ------------------------- ------ Lawson,[...]

I’m sure you’ve come across IE7’s warning “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?” Or IE’s more recent warning “Do you want to view only the page content that was delivered securely?” Other browsers have similar messages, which will rightly unnerve cautious internet users. These warnings are the result of the page being secured, delivered over HTTPS, but some of the page’s resources being delivered using HTTP. It’s a simple thing[...]