Richard Willis

It’s that time of year again when Olympia opens its doors to the world of IT in Education and BETT begins. I’ll be there on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and would love to meet as many of your as possible, whether you are customers, SLK users or just vaguely interested in what we do. Again I’ll be spending most of my time looking at the stands, so if you want to meet we can either arrange a date and time or you can just give me a call when you are free – although judging from past years it’s not always possible to hear my phone at BETT. Failing that, I’ll probably spend some time at the LP+ stand (E46 in the Main Hall), currently I’m planning to be there 1400-1445 every day. I also expect I’ll be hanging around the Microsoft stand as well as I know quite a few of the guys on there.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve got a new product in our line-up, Salamander MoodleRooms. This allows integration between School Management Systems and the MoodleRooms hosted Moodle solution.

So whether you are using Sims, Facility CMIS, Integris, Phoenix or any of the other main systems, we can now automatically maintain users and courses in your hosted Moodle as they change in your MIS.

On a technical level, we using MoodleRooms’ system integration tool (UIB) over https to send the changes up to MoodleRooms.

I often ftp files up to our web server so I can access them while on client machines. Up until now I’ve been using FireFtp a Firefox extension, which works great as an FTP client. However, I’d been getting annoyed by it for 2 reasons:

1. Not being able to use keyboard shortcuts as it was hosted in a browser
2. Not being able to use the Favourite links set up in explorer. About 90% of what I upload would be available in one-click from there.

So I started looking for an alternative client. What if found was even better. You can add a network location in Windows Explorer which is an ftp location and can then drag and drop files completely within Explorer.

To set it up all you need to do is select Computer in the folder view, then right click in the details pane and select "Add Network Location" and follow the wizard.

I imagine it’s present in other versions of Windows, but I’ve only tested it in Vista.

While debugging the issue in my last post, the customer pointed out the the owner of uploaded documents and created folders wasn’t being set as expected i.e. as the user logged SharePoint.

This was the result of overcoming the double-hop problem – one option is to access the file system as the SharePoint app pool, or the user defined in a configuration file. In these cases, it was this user who was set as the owner of the object. I’ve now fixed this so the owner will be the user logged into SharePoint.

I actually released a German version of My Documents a while back after a customer request. I just spent some time with them debugging an issue where files and folders weren’t getting saved. I tracked the issue down to a date time localisation issue. To check if the file/folder is present I’m using File.GetCreationTime because when impersonating a user File.Exists always returned true. GetCreationTime returns a "zero" date time if the file doesn’t exist, however it returns it in local time so when I was comparing against a manually created DateTime object it was always greater than it. Once I realised what was wrong it was easy to check properly.

Now that I’ve localised the web part once, all I need for other locales is a translation of the messages within the application, which makes it easy to get ready for other locales.

I’m a big user of Test Driven Development (TDD) using it in most of my projects. One of the leading proponents of TDD, Roy Osherove, is running a masterclass on TDD in London in September. It would be well worth going if you are interested in starting TDD and can persuade the budget holder to pay.

Quoting from the bbits blog:

Roy Osherove is giving an hands-on TDD Masterclass in the UK, September 21-25. Roy is author of "The Art of Unit Testing" (http://www.artofunittesting.com/), a leading tdd & unit testing book; he maintains a blog at http://iserializable.com (which amoung other things has critiqued tests written by Microsoft for asp.net MVC – check out the testreviews category) and has recently been on the Scott Hanselman podcast (http://bit.ly/psgYO) where he educated Scott on best practices in Unit Testing techniques. For a further insight into Roy’s style, be sure to also check out Roy’s talk at the recent Norwegian Developer’s Conference (http://bit.ly/NuJVa). 

Full Details here: http://bbits.co.uk/tddmasterclass

bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the event. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £2395!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry.  The draw will be made on September 1st and the winner informed by email and on bbits.co.uk/blog

If anyone has been wondering why I’ve been quieter than usual it’s been because I’ve been on annual leave. I’m now back and looking forward to the new school term, although before it starts I’ve got several installations to do.

While I’ve been away ITWorx and Microsoft have finally released SLK 1.4. Once I’ve got the booked in installs done, and any support the start of term starts, I’ll be properly integrating releasing it and integrating it into the source code repository.

I’ve just completed a Salamander Active Directory installation. The school wanted quite a few different types of groups, some of which are very interesting.

Firstly some standard ones:

• All Students
• All Staff
• Students by Year
• Tutor groups (including the teacher)
• Classes

Fairly standard stuff here, however all the groups were complicated by the fact that the school, and hence AD, was split into two, the sixth form and the rest of the school. So the structure was duplicated and groups went in different places depending on whether they were sixth form or not.

Now onto the more interesting groups:

Year x Tutors – All staff who take a registration group in year x.

Under 15 Students and Over 15 Students – The school has a content based media server and they wanted to target some of their content based on age.

An email group for each pupil containing all teachers who teach that pupil – That’s a lot of groups, but staff were beginning to get annoyed with bulk emails with subject "FAO teachers of x". It will be interesting to see how this one plays out, whether it has real value or whether it just clutters up the address lists.

I was pleased with how Salamander Active Directory could handle all of these just with configuration changes. I didn’t need to make any changes to the core engine, it just handled it beautifully.

We currently in the process of collating together all of the slide decks, and have almost got all of them in now. Here is a list of all the ones published so far. I will update this list as the last ones come in.

Steve Beswick – Keynote Speech

Building the Learning Gateway track

Steve Smith – Best Practices for Configuring your SharePoint Environment

Unified Communication for the Learning Gateway – Nathan Winters

Site Structure and Templates – Andrew Woodward

Branding Your Portal – Penny Coventry

Other Components you can use – Dave Coleman

User Adoption track

SharePoint Governance for Education – Alex Pearce

Driving User Adoption and Parental Engagement – Mike Herrity

The use of SLK as an E-Learning tool – Richard Willis

BECTA Data Security Guidelines – Ray Fleming

My Sites – How to use or not – Richard Willis

I’ve just been using the Google Chart API to create charts in some web parts. If you haven’t come across it before it’s a fantastic free tool for charting. For example the 2 images which follow come straight from Google using data embedded in the url.

All you need to do to include a chart is include an image element in your html pointing to the Google chart servers with the appropriate parameters. You do of course need an internet connection for this to work as the images are retrieved directly from Google.

You can control everything about how the chart is built and displayed and 9 different types of charts available. I think that this is a valuable addition to your toolset. To see more details go to the Developers Guide.

As an example I’ll work through an example with some of the data I was using, lesson attendance data.

This is generated with the following image element.

<img src=”http://chart.apis.google.com/chartcht=bvs&chs=400×125 &chco=008000,FFFF00,FF9900,FF0000,0000FF&chdl=Present|Late|Authorised%20Absence|Unauthorised20Absence&chba=a&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|Psy|Bus|Inf|Phy||1:|0|25|50 &chds=0,50 &chd=t:4,21,22,0|0,0,0,0|0,0,0,0|1,16,7,0” />

It looks complex, and until you get the hang of the parameters it can be, but going through each parameter in turn it turns out to be remarkably easy to use.

cht=bvs

This is the type of chart, in this case a vertical bar type.

chs=400×125

The size of chart in pixels

chco=008000,FFFF00,FF9900,FF0000,0000FF

The chart colours in hex format. Only hex format is supported.

chdl=Present|Late|Authorised%20Absence|Unauthorised20Absence

The chart labels

chba=a

Auto-size the chart columns if they don’t fit, By default each column is 25 pixels wide.

chxt=x,y

Defines the axes for the rest of the axis labelling.

chxl=0:|Psy|Bus|Inf|Phy||1:|0|25|50

Any axes labels. The digit followed by a : indicates it’s for that positioned axes in chxt. So this futher splits down into

0:|Psy|Bus|Inf|Phy meaning for axis x use the values Psy, Bus, Inf & Phy

1:|0|25|50 meaning for axis y use the values 0, 25 and 50

chds=0,50

This defines the scaling of the graph. Be default the scale is 0 to 100 so for this data where the maximum is 37, it would all be squashed in the bottom half of the image. Another thing to bear in mind is that values smaller than the ranges will not appear and values greater than the maximum will be truncated to the maximum.

chd=t:4,21,22,0|0,0,0,0|0,0,0,0|1,16,7,0

This is the actual data. The t indicates the type of data, in this case text with data scaling as we’ve included the chds parameter. The possibilities are

• Text: Float number 0 – 100
• Test with data scaling: Any positive or negative number
• Simple encoding: Integers 0 – 61. Each value represented by a single alphanumeric character. This is the shortest data string, but is very limited.
• Extended encoding: Integers 0 – 4095. Each value represented by two alphanumeric characters.