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From time to time someone adds the "Developer Community" tag to a post that's actually about something else. I wonder if by renaming the tag to "Developer Community Feedback" this wouldn't happen so much. After all, the group is called "Developer Community Feedback". If folk feel the proposed new name for the tag is too long, how about "DC Feedback"?

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Article
· Mar 3, 2017 1m read
Atelier - the first three months

Almost exactly three months ago Atelier 1.0 was released. If you are an early adopter and have any feedback to share, here's a thread we could use.

For instance, during the Field Test I posted this article about the two explorers, Atelier Explorer (AE) and Server Explorer (SE). Presumably more people are now using Atelier, so I'd be interested to hear how it's going.

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The top of my Answers tab looks like this:

To get to the question, first I have to click on the "Answer:" text (which only gets the appearance of a hyperlink when I mouse over it).

That click takes me here:

I now need to click on "Back to question page" in order to get where I want to be.

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Article
· Mar 2, 2017 1m read
Trusting the code you import

As more people join Developer Community, and with increasing efforts to promote code sharing, I'd like to draw fresh attention to this post I wrote a year ago. It spotlights a feature within the class compiler which is both useful and dangerous. When importing code (e.g. from an XML export of classes received from someone), it's worth considering the risks.

Even if that post doesn't seem relevant to you at the moment you may wish to note it for the future. A handy way of doing this is to click the star icon at the end of it.

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Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Can you keep a secret?

If you are developing applications that use CSP or Zen, or potentially any of the other InterSystems web-related stuff that's built on top of CSP, then it's important to know how to keep one particular secret.

A central part of the CSP security architecture is a server-side session key. "Server-side" because its value should never be revealed to the client that is issuing the web requests. If it is revealed, a malicious client might be able to use it to bypass your security and make your server do things you don't want it to.

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Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: The inconspicuous Menu button

Amongst the large fonts and chunky icons of Portal's pages, the Menu button in the top left corner is easily overlooked:

When clicked, it often produces the following menu:

When I remember it's there, I find the "View Console Log" option particularly handy.

I wrote "often" above because I've also noticed that the Menu contents change when I'm on a page within the Ensemble section of Portal:

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Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: Feel at home on the Home page

Until recently I didn't pay much attention to Portal's home page:

If it's not showing when you initially launch Portal you can easily jump to it using the button / tab at the top of the left-hand column of options. And later during your session, get there via the Home link that will be visible at the top of every page.

On the Home page the "Recent" section is automatically maintained for you.

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Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: Use the search box

User interfaces such as Portal often give us multiple ways of doing a task. Sometimes we stick with habits and don't realize that another way might save us time.

Here's one that I learned by watching someone else using Portal.

Use the Search box to get quickly to a page that may otherwise be several layers deep in the Portal hierarchy. For example, suppose I want to check the status of the ECP networking:

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The class %Compiler.UDL.TextServices arrived in 2015.1, bringing us methods for exporting a class in UDL format (i.e. looking just like we're used to seeing it in Studio), and importing a UDL format definition back into a namespace. Some source control tools including our Deltanji are now able to use UDL format, resulting in diffs that are easier to understand.

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Article
· Dec 15, 2016 1m read
Version history for the production class

Last week I was onsite with a new customer of ours, implementing Deltanji to give them control of their development and deployment cycle. One particularly satisfying part of the visit was seeing their pleasure at how their production class now records its changes over time, allowing them to quickly diff the versions and see what configuration items have been added or what settings altered. ​

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While testing Atelier 1.0.255 I noticed that the namespace subtree of my Atelier project used different icon shading for the top-level Classes folder compared with the top-level Routines one:

Drilling down into parts of the Wasabi package helped me work out the significance of white-filled icons versus brown-filled ones:

A package is white if there are no classes in it, but only subpackages.

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I'm pleased to see this in the documentation of the just-published 2017.1 Field Test of Ensemble:

"In certain circumstances, it is useful to create namespaces that are not enabled for Ensemble. In this release you can do this by clearing the Make this an Ensemble namespace checkbox when creating a new namespace. "

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