One of the biggest lessons learned over the many years of software development is that if you aren't listening to your customers about what they want, you are completely missing the mark.  This is a rather simple point that so many times gets missed.  That's why I am proud to work on the Fashion Mobile  team at Syndicated Methods (stepping back for readers that are not familiar with Fashion Mobile, it is a specially tailored instance of MobilePipes for the fashion industry).  From inception, this product has incorporated features that have helped our customers solve problems.  We take in feedback, survey our users, and try to pick a couple of the most sought after features.  Doing so ensures that we are adding valuable additions that our customers want.

Recently, one of our sales representatives was visiting a client talking through a recent Fashion Mobile installation.  The topic of conversation was along the lines of how are things going, what would you change, is the product satisfying your needs.  This particular client used Fashion Mobile to fulfill their own sales process.   We designed an application that allowed their sales representatives to demonstrate their clothing lines using their iPhone.  The tool was very well received by the client, with one major exception.  Along with client information the sales representatives found it rather cumbersome to have to switch out of their application while on the road to find directions to the client site.  They wanted some way of staying within Fashion Mobile to find their customers on a map.

This sounded similar to feedback that we had received from other customers.  So, keeping true to the content in this article, we rolled it into Fashion Mobile.  Customers of Fashion Mobile now have a way to work with mass Geo Coded locations within the product.  There are two pieces that we have rolled in.  The first piece is the ability to load Geo Coded locations into the Fashion Mobile Control Panel.  With the latest release of Fashion Mobile, customers can now locate and save Geo Coded addresses for consumption on the iPhone client.  The second piece is a new Module in Fashion Mobile for retrieving those Geo Coded locations.  With this new Module, iPhone developers can retrieve multiple pairs of Latitude / Longitude pairs that allow for any development pattern that the iPhone supports.  Examples of this are dropping a point on the map, providing driving directions, finding distances between points, for example.   As just a little taste, the following screen shot shows you what the Control Panel looks like for this new feature:

MobilePipes grows up!

The MobilePipes team works hard on our product suite making sure that our customers are buying software that is top notch, bright and shiny, reliable, easy to use, stands the test of time, and, well you get the point!  We could assure all day long that our products meet this criteria but we took the extra steps to prove it. 

MobilePipes was officially certified by Microsoft this month as a certified product.  This means a lot for our marketing and sales material because we get to include the logo all over the place, but more importantly, it assures our customers that they are buying a quality product. 

For those familiar with the process we ensured that our code meets the Microsoft standard for .NET based Web Services, Managed Code, and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. 

SyndicatedBlogs is a fairly new blog.  The staff here at Syndicated Methods are feeling our way through things to see what format works best for our company and customers.  We started the blog with lots of development tips and tricks that we found useful, but  hey, isn't that what  Google is for? Maybe people will stumble across those types of posts and find them useful but acting as a third party "tid bit" aggregation service will not serve our customers well.  It takes time to write those posts and make sure the content is relevant, and that is time taken away from product development and implementation work.

After some looking back we realized that we want a blog to distribute information about our organization and products that users would never see outside of the organization.  Tips and tricks about how to use MobilePipes is much more suitable for this channel.  And upcoming news such as MobilePipes becoming a Microsoft Certified Product (well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, this is pending approval of Microsoft but we are confident :)).

So, the future of this Blog will be dedicated to development news in the industry that relates to our services and products.  Additionally, news and tutorials about our products and client components for using those products.  I will conclude with an article from Joel Spolsky, to be exact, his last Inc. article where he posted hindsight on the blogging phenomena and gave tips for corporate blogs that are in line with this new strategy for SyndicatedBlogs.

Joel Spolsky's Last Word

{ Happy Blogging }

After writing my recent post for Consuming Cross Domain Services using jQuery, I started investigating how we could leverage the power of ajax with our flagship product for mobile solutions, MobilePipes.

The service layer for MobilePipes is written in the .NET platform using WCF. Right away I realized that we are missing support for JSON serialization. MobilePipes currently supports SOAP and POX formatting through WCF service configurations. Microsoft did a fantastic job with WCF with separating configuration from implementation so I knew that getting JSON formats in place should be a snap. One of the ways to achieve this is to define a different interface for the different services that we want to expose. SOAP formatting is a the standard Service Contract that by default is configured when you use the tools in Visual Studio.

Other formats get a bit tricky because you need to define certain attributes that instruct WCF how to behave at runtime. For instance, POX services are configured with the following configuration:

That's it! Simple as that.  This configuration tells WCF to return a string from this method in the HTTP GET request. In other words, it skips SOAP formatting and just returns the string ... in the case of POX it's simply XML.  Which gets me back to JSON. In order to get MobilePipes up to speed, we have created a new Service Interface with the JSON format.  All we need to to is add the format that we want returned like so:

Now any clients that choose to use JSON rather than a traditional XML format can just point to the correct Service Endpoint. All of these endpoints are encapsulated in their own assembly and call out into the domain library. All of this allows us to keep our domain library for MobilePipes completely separate while providing SOAP, XML, and JSON return formats.  With the recent serivce endpoint for JSON, any ajax libraries can now seamlessy call MobilePipes services.