We are headed to the Mono meeting on October 23rd & 24th in Boston, MA. http://www.go-mono.com/meeting/

Let us know if you plan to attend.

We look forward to there being an open exchange of ideas.

Check them out:

http://www.codeplex.com/Project/ListForums.aspx?ProjectName=sugarcrm

This announcement is probably a bit premature, but we have SplendidCRM running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES).  We’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks, ever since the great folks on the Mono team created a VMware image of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) with a stable version of Mono and MonoDevelop.

Our first instinct was to copy the entire SplendidCRM project to SLED and recompile under MonoDevelop.  This worked very well, with MonoDevelop being able to convert a Visual Studio 2003 project into its own forma ...

We have been looking for an alternative to SourceForge as a place to host SplendidCRM.  Our wait has seemed to pay off as Microsoft has just announced CodePlex.  http://www.codeplex.com

"CodePlex is an online software development environment for open and shared source .NET developers to create, host and manage projects throughout the project lifecycle. It has been written from the ground up in C# using .NET 2.0 technology and Visual Studio Team System on the back end. CodePlex is open to the public free of charge."

It has been a while since my last entry.  I have been working so hard on the reporting module that I simply could not spare the cycles.  In any case, progress is good and we hope to have a beta release at the beginning of July.

The SplendidCRM Reporting module will use the Report Definition Language (RDL) that Microsoft created a few years ago.  RDL is an XML-based specification.  This is going to provide unsurpassed flexibility when it comes to report generation.  SplendidCRM will have a reporting module similar to that of SugarCRM, but it will also have the ability to import and export a report in RDL.

Microsoft has indicated that they will release Reporting Services as part of SQL Server Express, which suggests that there will soon be a free report designer. 

Eventually, we should be able to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with the reports stored ...

We have just completed development on the ACL system.  ACL is a critical component of any CRM, so we are pleased to be able to offer it so soon after the release of our 1.0 product.

If you are interested in a preview, please send me an email and I will see if we can included you in our private/internal beta testing.  Otherwise, look for a public beta in the next two weeks.

We were making great progress porting SplendidCRM to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.0, right up until the Sybase provider failed. 

The hard part is usually converting the SQL scripts to the Sybase format.  It was a bit painful writing SQL functions in Java, but we did it.  And we resigned ourselves into accepting that Sybase does not allow stored procedures to accept a text field as an input.  But it is always frustrating when we have to debug another company's product.

The Sybase ADO.NET driver has a problem when parameters are used through the IDbDataParameter common interface. An Input/Output parameter throws an exception when the Value parameter is accessed after procedure execution.

We have posted a bug on the Sybase site, but we are not optimistic that they will fix the problem any time soon.  Until they fix the bug, we cannot continue.

While working on a component that will allow the SplendidCRM installation utility to update an existing database, we ran across an obscure Oracle bug.  Here is the error:

            PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "" when expecting one of the following:     return

The error ...