Altoros Has Joined a Hi-Tech Park in Eastern Europe

by Alex KhizhniakOctober 3, 2008

In this blog post, we share our achievements and challenges during Q3 2008.

Table of Contents

Joining Belarus Hi-Tech Park

Altoros is now officially a member of Belarus Hi-Tech Park. It is a government-supported environment aimed at helping promising software companies to adopt the latest technologies and grow faster. The association exists starting from 2005 and has established strong ties with other similar organizations around the globe. For Altoros, it is a good chance to find new partnerships (both commercial and technology-driven) and become even more dynamic, as well as mature.

Belarus Hi-Tech Park (Image credit)

New technology expertise

Between July and September, Altoros technology-specific teams also completed a number of projects and gained new technology expertise.

.NET Framework

The .NET team at Altoros is currently working on the .NET-based “Training Diary” project for active sports-loving and devoted people. This web-based service lets sportsmen plan their training strategies and store the data on the workouts they have already performed, planned, or skipped. The application also has the Coach functionality, which enables users to train sportsmen, track their workouts, define training plans and strategies, and analyze statistics to boost training efficiency. Sportsmen can be divided into teams and either have their own coach each, the community coach for a few teams, or a global coach who trains any sportsman within the instance of the Diary.

In the future, the team also plans to develop the desktop version of the Diary and introduce more community features to enable user communication via forums, blogs, file exchange, groups, etc. In the course of development, aside from .NET Framework 3.5 (WCF, ASP.NET), the team at Altoros will use Windows Server 2003/2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008.

Ruby on Rails

Altoros completed the first stage of a Ruby on Rails-based mobile advertising project for INTXT Exchange. The project provides a wide range of advertising options, enabling clients to create and manage advertising campaigns, view reports, and submit payments online. The advertising partners can also set their own publishing properties and receive payments. With this system, anyone can register to receive advertisements via SMS to his or her phone and get paid for looking through the received ads.

Windows Mobile

The experts at Altoros released the beta version of its Windows Mobile-based logistic application. The project is designed for technicians, allowing them to see their work orders and items needed to complete the job, handle their balance on several stocks, and register time and mileage for the work orders on their PDA. At the same time, managers in the office will be able to control work orders and see where each technician is located at that very moment. Among others, the team used .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and SQL Compact Edition 3.5 to develop this system.

Adobe Flex

Our dedicated team of Adobe Flex developers launched the public version of Apatar On-Demand data integration solution. Apatar On-Demand is a hosted pre-built service that synchronizes data between Salesforce.com CRM and desktop QuickBooks accounting software. It makes it possible to set recurring or one-time synchronization of account, contact, order, and opportunity data, while preserving links between tables in both Salesforce.com and QuickBooks. The team implemented Flex 2/3, Action Script 3, FlexUni, and other technologies to deliver Apatar On-Demand.

Supporting technology community

Altoros organized the recent Belarus .NET User Group meeting, which was held on September 11, 2008, and featured a keynote speaker from Microsoft. The meeting garnered the attendance of more people than ever before in the two-year history of the user group. Almost one hundred applications were received and 64 specialists took part in the conference. Sergiy Baydachnyy of Microsoft Ukraine delivered a technical review of the latest additions to Internet Explorer 8, after which Andrei Varanovich (Microsoft MVP) spoke on the key capacities of SharePoint 2007.

The case of the day: a subsystem for entries

Here, we enlist some technical challenges our team encountered and the creative solutions we came up with.

Every time one tries to create a WorkItem through the WorkItemTracking API in TFS’05, TFS’05 SP1, and TFS’08, the GCHandle error occurs, which is an obstacle for many .NET developers worldwide. Our .NET team solved this challenge by creating an IIS Application Pool for each tire of the app. After that, our team granted IIS Application Pool user the rights to write in YOUR CACHE FOLDER catalogue and in places where the access to the WorkItemStore API was required in the configuration.