Visual Studio Item Templates

The Visual Studio Integrated Design Environment (IDE) is highly customizable and can be extended.  In fact, it’s possible to automate repetitive and tedious item creation tasks through the use of Item Templates.  Consider the insertion of a copyright as the first line in all new class files.  Under normal circumstances, this would be a manual task with each new class file created, but Item Templates can automate the process.  The steps below outline the procedure for accomplishing just that using Visual Studio 2005.    Continue Reading

Dealing with Timezones in a Global Environment

Global collaboration can be tricky for a number of reasons.  For instance, when developing an application that is shared between users in two or more time zones, an important item to consider is the accuracy of time and date calculations.  When making decisions based on dates and times, differences in time zones can substantially affect the integrity of data.  This article describes some practices meant to limit your riskContinue Reading

SolidWorks Event Wrappers

The SolidWorks API (Application Programming Interface) is immensely powerful.  In fact, if something is doable within SolidWorks, the chances are good that there is a corresponding API.  As a result, automation possibilities are endless.  The SolidWorks API documentation is outstanding and, in most cases, provides exceptional detail.  However, one area that is somewhat tricky to navigate is event handling.  This article will cover an example for event handling when developing for SolidWorks.  Continue Reading

Reasons to Develop using VMs

When planning any software development project, whether it is a point or enterprise solution, there are several key questions to answer before a line of code is written.  How will you know it’ll work on the required operating systems?  How can you give the developers a standard development environment without buying or configuring hardware?  Once developed, how can it be tested?  Virtualization is a simple yet effective way for addressing these critical concerns related to software development environmentsContinue Reading

Basics of Aras Mark-up Language and NASH

Aras Innovator has an underlying mark-up language it uses for all of its database transactions. The language is referred to as Aras Mark-up Language, or AML. Aras also provides a sandbox interface for developing and running AML, called NASH. Here’s a short primer for getting familiar with AML and NASH.  Continue Reading

Automating Transfer of SmarTeam Vault Data

With every upgrade to ENOVIA SmarTeam (not to mention upgrades to CAD, Office and database platforms) there’s no question about the benefits of building a test environment for validation prior to a production roll-out.  An important piece of building a test environment is a properly configured test vault.  Quite often, a successful test doesn’t require a complete copy of the entire production vault, so let’s take a look at a simple process to copy specific files from a production system to a test environment on demand.  Continue Reading

Razorleaf Helpdesk: Help Us Help You

We regularly have clients ask us what information they should gather concerning a support issue, prior to calling the Razorleaf helpdesk.  So we thought it made sense to answer that question publicly.  Here’s how you can “help us, help you.”  Continue Reading