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Pulling things together as India draws near

Time is ticking on

Imagine Cup Time is ticking, and we're flat out working on getting the digital recovery environment finished. It seems that despite some pretty damn good project planning, for students anyway, we're only a week or so away from deadline and we're still doing some of the development.

Ahh well, we're making good progress, the system looks quite pretty, it works well, and we're tying it all together as this blog is being written. Of course, tying it all together is introducing a whole myriad of problems, or bugs, which are painstakingly being eradicated one by one.

If there's one thing we love right now it's Team Foundation Server. As we've said before, it really makes our lives a lot easier.

One of the things we've been pulling together has been interoperation between a few of our different clients. We've got a simple messaging system using none other than MSMQs which, it has to be said, are as easy as pie to work with. Who could possibly resist the charms of a simple call to .Send() or .Receive()?

Now that we've got all this in place, the system's starting to look as though it's one nice big whole rather than multiple individual elements.

More of an issue for us over the past week or so, has been the desperate hunt for a suitable controller for the system. We've considered many alternatives, including the Media Centre remote, but finally we think we've found what we want.

We're all looking forward to the moment of truth when it arrives at our door. If it works as we expect, then we're going to be three very happy bunnies; more on that when we actually have it though.

It's certainly been an interesting task developing the whole system and thinking about the controller and user interactions; we've been trying to minimise the amount of action the users have to take while still getting the most out of the system.

Developing for such a specialist group as intensive care patients, there's always a single question at the front of our minds: Can they use this? Luckily for us, we've been informed that, yes, it is believed that the majority of patients would be able to manipulate and understand the controller we're looking at. Score!

So basically, at the moment we're pulling things together, tidying up loose ends, and generally making sure the application is ready for India.

It really gives us a great sense of satisfaction to see it all coming together as one coherent whole. It's going to be great heading out to India. We're all really looking forward to it. ®

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