Posts categorized “CaseDetective”.

CaseDetective for FogBugz permanently discontinued

CaseDetective128.pngI am sorry to announce that as of 9th July 2009 CaseDetective for FogBugz
has been permanently discontinued.

I wish I could continue to develop and support CaseDetective but this has proven impossible for a number of reasons.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers for supporting CaseDetective for FogBugz.

For further assistance please contact support@imij.co.uk

CaseDetective 2.0.d56 Released

CaseDetective128.pngIf you downloaded CaseDetective 2.0.d53 when I announced it the other day, please updated to v2.0.d56 at your earliest convenience.

There’s a few important updates.

1) Fixed a problem with logging on when there is only one user set up in FogBugz.

2) There was a potential problem with running CaseDetective in Windows with AIR 1.5.0.

3) Fixed a problem with auto-updating under Mac OS X.

The third fix is particularly tricky, if you’re running Mac OS X it would be best to update to version 2.0.d56 by visiting the hidden (for now) downloads page and using the Install Now/Upgrade Now button.

Getting FogBugz data into Excel / CaseDetective 2.0 Sneak Peek

Having seen an increase in tweets and support requests to the FogBugz guys about getting data from FogBugz into Excel, I wasn’t surprised to see Fog Creek finally write a blog post explaining how to use the FogBugz API from within Excel to get a basic spreadsheet.

It’s not the nicest of mechanisms for getting data into Excel from FogBugz, but it works.

Over the last few months I’ve had quite a few inquiries about using CaseDetective with FogBugz On Demand.

At first my standard response was basically “sorry, CaseDetective 2.0 will do this but I can’t tell you when that’ll be available”. But it’s really frustrating, knowing that you’re in mid-development with something that’s waaaaay too basic and not at all ready for release, but already has the exact functionality most people are looking for, namely CSV export.

One day I caved, I let on to someone that there’s a development release out there on that there interweb that I use for testing, it was a bit old, but would do what they desperately needed.

It worked for that person, they got the job done, they were happy, and I got a nice warm fuzzy feeling out of helping someone in a bit of a bind.

Then I mentioned it to the next person, and then the next, and the next … you get the picture. Each person was asked to keep it a secret, and must join the CaseDetective Beta Test Team in order to continue using it.

I’ve had some great feedback, much of which is now in my FogBugz database waiting for me to actually get the time to implement, but some critical bugs have been squashed, and I think it’s now reasonably stable, if very very very slow and missing many features.

I’ve decided that seeing as so many people are simply looking for CSV output, and might be interested in using something a bit lot more user friendly than the raw API XML data into Excel method, I’m going to make the development version of CaseDetective 2.0 semi-public, anyone who reads this can give it a bash.

And what’s more, I’m not just going to make CaseDetective On Demand available, I’m also going to make CaseDetective 2.0 Desktop available too.

Try CaseDetective On Demand

Install CaseDetective 2.0 Desktop

Please send any feedback, big, small, nasty or nice to support@imijsoft.com

CaseDetective Logon.png
CaseDetective Cases.png
CaseDetective Pie Chart.png
CaseDetective Line Chart.png

Enjoy!

We're back!

CaseDetective128.pngYes, it’s true, we’re back and developing CaseDetective for FogBugz again!

It must be true as the IMiJ Software and CaseDetective websites have had a bit of a face lift. There are further changes in the wings, but both sites are looking good, even if I say so my self.

There’s no date for when CaseDetective 2.0 will be available just yet, but be assured development is well under way.

CaseDetective Development On Hold

The festive holidays are a dangerous time of year, spending time with family and friends and generally having a good time away from your computer can be disastrous for an ongoing project.

This year, it’s been doubly disastrous for CaseDetective, not only has development time been non-existent and support reduced as usual, but I’ve had time to reflect on CaseDetective’s future, and more importantly on it’s place in my life.

I’ve come to the (long overdue) decision that development on CaseDetective is to be put on hold, I’m not going to work on CaseDetective or any other significant development project in my spare time for the foreseeable future.

For a long time I’ve struggled to balance time with my family and friends, personal interests and health, (money making) consulting work and CaseDetective, something has to give.

My family is everything to me, I love my wife and daughter and the last two weeks have enforced my long standing regret at having to spend a considerable amount of my (and my family’s) free time supporting and developing CaseDetective. There’s also a knock-on effect to the rest of my family and friends, who don’t get anywhere near the attention they deserve, neglecting them makes me sad.

I’ve also completely neglected my health in the last few months too. The year started well as I lost a good bit of weight and improved my fitness through running and watching my diet, but running has gone out the window as time got squeezed out by more CaseDetective support and development of version 2.0. I’m feeling very unfit, and am at my heaviest in ten years. I need to make time for running and biking again. I used to love mountain biking in my early twenties, getting up early on a Sunday morning and going for a 25-50 mile ride up and down hills coming home covered in mud was bliss. I want to have the health and time to enjoy physical activities again.

Reading and sleeping, I want to do more!!!

I think CaseDetective has also impinged on my mind so much that on occasions it may have had an impact on my consulting work. Sometimes I’m so wrapped up in something I’m doing with CaseDetective that I feel I’m not giving my real job it’s deserved attention. That is unacceptable, and with my current contract being a pretty intense project with an aggressive time scale, I can’t afford to slip up because my mind is elsewhere.

Many people would have put a stop to development of CaseDetective a long time ago just because of the terrible return on investment. CaseDetective has been in development since September 2004, with a few hiatuses along the way, let’s say that’s 156 weeks (3 years) worth. With a conservative estimate of 8 hours development/support time per week (it was actually full time for about 6 months), that is 1,248 hours. Let’s take a reduced consulting fee of £25 per hour for a grand total of £31,200 worth of my time spent on developing CaseDetective. Seeing as CaseDetective has had a net revenue (according to eSellerate) of approx. £1,885 ($3,771.47), it really doesn’t stack up well, and that’s not even taking into consideration expenditure on tools and hosting etc.

One of the major problems I have with CaseDetective though, is that I no longer have any need for it myself. Most of the functionality I need for bug, feature and inquiry tracking is in FogBugz, and I rarely want to report on the data held in FogBugz any longer. So you can imagine that my enthusiasm for developing and improving CaseDetective is somewhat diminished. I still believe CaseDetective could be a great product, and one that I would use if I added some of the features I have planned, but to get it where I want it would take considerable development time. At the moment, I’m simply not willing to commit so much of my free time to make it happen.

So development of CaseDetective is on hold. Support for existing customers will continue for the time being (at least six months), but I’m going to take down the majority of the CaseDetective website and stop taking any further sales.

There is a slim chance that development could resume if I find myself at a loose end without full time employment so I’m not thinking about selling or otherwise releasing the CaseDetective source code.

If there is anyone out there with a product that could help CaseDetective customers continue to extract CSV files and/or PDF reports from FogBugz without having to know any SQL, please drop me a line and I’ll pass your details onto my customer base. If there is a free license or “competitive upgrade” license available, all the better.

Thank you to all the great people in the MicroISV/BoS community that have supported me with kind words of encouragement and advise throughout my time developing CaseDetective, you helped me immensely.

A big thank you must go out to everyone at Fog Creek, especially Michael H. Pryor, without your help I couldn’t have got as far as I did.

Also, thanks to all my customers, thank you for showing your support for CaseDetective in the best possible way, by buying a license! And thank you for being such nice people if we had any communication.

And finally, thank you to my wife Mandy, for putting up with my countless hours working on CaseDetective and supporting me all the way. I love you so much.

CaseDetective 1.3.4 released

I’ll let the release notes tell the story…

Changes In CaseDetective 1.3.4

Released 2007-12-13

  • Bug Fix: Error while creating indexs on the Attachment, Cases or CaseEvents table.
  • In some rare cases CaseDetective could not create indexes on it’s cache database due to non-unique data in a primary key, this has now been fixed.
  • Bug Fix: The previous change (1.3.3) for the above bug fix introduced some database incompatibilities.
    • In order to fix the problem across all supported database types, CaseDetective now requires MySQL 5.0+ as opposed to MySQL 4.0+. MS Access and SQL Server 2000+ are still supported as usual.
  • Bug Fix: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) compatibility.
    • Updated tools and some third party libraries for better Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) compatibility.
  • Bug Fix: Support FogBugz 6.0 for non-administrators.
    • CaseDetective now supports changes made to the FogBugz 6.0 database schema for permissions, non-administrators can now see their cases!
  • Bug Fix: Improved permissions adherence.
    • Some changes were made to better support permissions, summary filters now correctly miss projects etc that a user does not have permission to see in FogBugz (4, 5 & 6).

    PLEASE NOTE: This does not mean CaseDetective fully supports FogBugz 6.0, it just means you may be able to use the “classic” filters in FogBugz 6.0 with CaseDetective 1.3.x, you will not be able to use the new search based filters introduced with FogBugz 6.0. Full support for FogBugz 6.0 and it’s new search based filters will arrive in CaseDetective 2.0 and CaseDetective On Demand by early 2008.

    As always, CaseDetective 1.3.4 for FogBugz is available from the download page.

    Oops, CaseDetective 1.3.3 pulled, working on CaseDetective 1.3.4.

    Oops, turns out CaseDetective 1.3.3 wasn’t so good for all database types and versions, so I’ve pulled it.

    I’m working on CaseDetective 1.3.4, but it’s a little trickier than I thought due to what SQL syntax is and isn’t supported across different versions of Access, SQL Server and MySQL.

    It may take a couple of days to fully test an alternative way of fixing the bug that was supposed to have been taken care of by CaseDetective 1.3.3.

    Thank goodness I upload the website for each version to a brand new directory and switch a symbolic link from old to new. So to revert to 1.3.2 simply consisted of logging onto my web server and switching the symbolic link from new to old.

    CaseDetective 1.3.3 for FogBugz released.

    Dumm, dumm, dumm, another one bites the dust, clap clap!

    CaseDetective 1.3.3 has been released with just one iccle fix.

    In very rare conditions CaseDetective would fail to get either attachments, cases or case events due to a “duplicate values in unique index” error.

    There was a little bit of Cartesian (black) magic happening, now vanquished!

    If you’ve not had the problem then chances are you’ll not need this update, but if you do need it you can grab it from CaseDetective’s download page.

    Weight off my mind.

    Phew, last night I killed a bug in CaseDetective 2.0 in less than 30 minutes of development that had been bugging me (pun intended) for well over 4 weeks!

    And what’s more, 30 minutes later after re-activating another feature that I’d disabled because I had a bug in that code that had also been bugging me for well over 4 weeks was also fixed, without me making any further changes!

    I hate (love) it when that happens! :-)

    The annoying thing is, my code for the first feature is virtually the same as before last night’s edits, I’d almost got the bug fixed before in that I’d whittled it down to a very specific block of code that I could hard-code around to get the results I wanted, but couldn’t get the proper solution to work, even though it looked absolutely right. I worked and worked on the area, making sure I fully understood the all the properties and events of the classes involved, but alas the solution failed to reveal itself.

    Out of frustration I switched one parameter to a function that should have absolutely no effect from “true” to “false”, fully expecting that the problem still existed. It fixed the problem. Fantastic! But also very very annoying. I can only assume it’s either a very subtle bug in the framework, or more likely me not quite fully understanding the event interactions of a couple of classes.

    I tell you, it feels great to have fixed these two problems, they were two great weights stopping me from progressing in important areas of CaseDetective, and stopped me from being able to efficiently concentrate on my work.

    A great weight has been lifted off my shoulders, full steam ahead!

    Status Update 2007-11-19

    Availability

    A couple of weeks ago I was supposed to write a post about my availability for hire, having just completed the year (and a bit) long project for my last client. I guess I was too busy either enjoying some relaxed quality time with my wife and daughter, or getting in some development time on CaseDetective 2.0 and missed the opportunity.

    Anyway, today I started a new contract I bid for and won. It’s just a 20 week one, for the very same client I’ve recently finished up with, but this time doing system analysis and design for a brand new system. It’s a great project, in fact a whopping great big project of huge importance for the client, but I’m relishing the challenge.

    CaseDetective

    Although CaseDetective 1.3.2 came out a couple of weeks ago with support for FogBugz 6.0 password formats, it turns out there were other more problematic database schema changes that will cause problems for many CaseDetective users.

    As such, I’m going to have to say that CaseDetective 1.3.2 is unlikely to work for most FogBugz 6.0 users, not that it ever officially supported FogBugz 6.0 anyway. For FogBugz 6.0 support CaseDetective 2.0 will be required, which we’re hoping to have released early next year.