transientis.com - António Melo’s transient moods

Very good tips from my colleague Rodrigo Castelo on the importance of keeping things simple to accomplish a very good user experience and adoption ratio. Check his post Agile Platform Community Edition - Adventures and Lessons.

Despite being especially useful if you need to create an installer, the tips apply to any kind of software. Check it out!

That’s right, that’s a plus (+) before the one (1). We managed to finish everything to the (closed) Beta, 2 days before the estimated date.

My congratulations to all the Engineering Team. Taking in account all the stuff that was made, mainly on the latest days, this is really cool. Probably there are other team members in a better position to mention the challenges that were surpassed. In that case, just leave a comment.

<disclaimer>
Today, it was a tiring day for me - 3 sessions from the MS TechDays 2007 during the afternoon (great stuff, Microsoft), with one extra session starting at 20 o’clock and ending at 23h+. Basically, 9 hours almost non-stop. So, I’ll for sure miss lots of stuff:
</disclaimer>

• OutSystems Express Edition:
  • Late Service Studio instability fixes
  • Late Service Studio web editor usability improvements - and yes, usability tests were also made by Mr. T., before changing the product
  • XSP (OutSystems’ own version) - deployment architecture refactoring to fix several problems
  • OutSystems Express installer user experience improvements
  • .Net 2.0 connection pooling cleanup in order to get rid of damaged transactions. Related to System.Data.SqlClient.SqlTransaction.Zombie() somehow accessing a null connection
  • And so many other problems fixed…
  • …but still lots of them still missing
• Major outsystems.net Community site redesign, to accommodate:
  • Support for Downloads area instead of Documents
  • Major re-structure of documents/downloads (simplified)
  • Support for public, anonymous view of the existing downloadable content
  • Complete re-structure of forums (really simplified, less forums)
  • Back-office support for OutSystems Express Beta program (user approvals, etc.)
  • First-user experience completely redone
  • Improved Samples
  • OutSystems IT Asset Management - decision to support Windows XP Home Edition, and consequently application was changed

I’m pretty sure that these latest achievements were possible due to (besides the excellent team, that I already take for grant!) the principles behind the Agile Manifesto, that OutSystems is following for several years. <pub>And, of course, due to the OutSystems Platform “built-to-change” nature</pub>

Hi

Just missing 8 days for the release of OutSystems Express Edition 4.1, beta 1. This will be a closed Beta program. If you are interested in trying it out, leave me a note. Depending on several factors, it might be possible.

I’ll just leave here two screen shots of two OutSystems tools (HEAD code).

OutSystems Service Studio, the main IDE:

OutSystems Service Service Center, the web based management console:

Later on, I’ll also leave here a picture of the bundled application that we are releasing with the OutSystem Express Edition.

I didn’t expect it to be so thrilling. Some months ago, when the rumors started spreading inside the company, it seemed just a natural step - in a near future, we would release OutSystems Express Edition

Since its inception, back to 2001, OutSystems has been relatively closed. But now we are opening our doors, or at least I hope so.

We just finished the build (known as alpha 1), and selected end-users will be trying it.