Simply Managing

By and large my job at AppSwing is one of management. Whether those that are “managed” (hello!) feel that it is a worthwhile exercise is open to debate and their own personal blogs. Anyway this week has been a strange one for me as I have spent 90% of it doing coding, something that I left behind some ten odd years ago. I have continued to dabble on and off over that period, my websites for example, with the exception of this one, have all pretty much been coded by hand in Perl and I have done bits and pieces at my places of employment. But this week has been full on proper coding and I have simply loved it.

By trade I was a PowerBuilder developer and in the dim and distant past Cobol. I also did a fair amount of work with SQL Server and consider myself to be a dab hand at a bit of T-SQL, something that I have found one of the most useful skills to have in a development environment. This week though has all been about JScript and VBScript which I have had some previous exposure to. I have never had any problem picking up a new language – there is only a limited number of things you can do in each after all. Every language has strings, numeric, dates etc etc and they all (pretty much) have functions to allow you to get a substring, carry out numeric functions, if..else etc. So how hard can it be to learn a new language armed with a little knowledge and Google. Anyway I digress.

I had two specific projects to carry out. The first was to create a mobile version of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) which can be accessed from ANY web enabled mobile device. This will form the basis of a new product which is to be called AppConsole. I was helped in this task by our own product AppServer which automatically creates HTML versions of existing Windows applications from which it is possible to take a slice of an application. You can see what is going to look like in the screenshots below.

The second task was to add a webinar registration function on our website. From the beginning of February we are going to run weekly webinars for anyone who cares to sign up. These will give a live demonstration of AppServer showing off it’s power. The registration process needed to capture the details of the individual and then send them a confirmation email. This email needed to be personalised and also had to give them the opportunity to create an entry in their calendar for the webinar.

I’m not going to bore you with details (in this post at any rate) of the technical nitty-gritty but suffice to say I was hooked on the coding bug again – which is just as well as I need to finish AppConsole!

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