Dovico Timesheet: Year in Review and Plans for 2024

As the current calendar year draws to a close and a new one is about to begin, this is often a good time to take a moment to reflect on the past and plan for the future. With that in mind, we wrote an article to review what happened with Dovico Timesheet over the past year as well as our plans for 2024.

As the current calendar year draws to a close and a new one is about to begin, this is often a good time to take a moment to reflect on the past and plan for the future.

With that in mind, we wrote the following article to review what happened with Dovico Timesheet over the past year as well as our plans for 2024: Dovico Timesheet: Year in Review and Plans for 2024

Dovico Timesheet - Quick Assign

We're pleased to announce that a new Quick Assign view has been created for Dovico Timesheet that allows you to assign or unassign employees across projects quickly!

We're pleased to announce that a new Quick Assign view has been created for Dovico Timesheet that allows you to assign or unassign employees across projects quickly!

The new Quick Assign view is made possible thanks to a feature we released earlier this year, where tasks can now remain linked to a task template.

The following article walks you through how the new view works: Dovico Timesheet Quick Assign

Dovico Timesheet - Allowing tasks to be kept linked to a task template

We just released a feature for Dovico Timesheet where a task can be kept linked to a task template. This new feature allows you to easily adjust the properties of the task template and have those changes applied to all tasks that are linked to it.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that the company that I work for, Dovico Software, just released a feature for our Dovico Timesheet product allowing tasks to be kept linked to a task template.

Because a project can have multiple tasks created from the same task template, it can be time consuming, tedious, and error prone to manually make adjustments to each task especially if you need to make adjustments across projects.

This new feature allows you to easily adjust the properties of the task template itself and have those changes applied to all tasks that are linked to it.

For more information on how this feature works, the following article gives a detailed overview: The ability to have a task linked to a task template

Safari 16.4 and WebAssembly Fixed-Width SIMD from C#

This week, Safari 16.4 was released and with it came support for WebAssembly's fixed-width SIMD feature! With this update, all modern browsers now support this feature.

As shown in the following image, WebAssembly fixed-width SIMD allows code to take advantage of hardware instructions on the device to speed up certain computations by running them in parallel.

A visual representation comparing data being processed
one element at a time with normal arithmetic (Single
Instruction, Single Data) versus four at a time, in
this case, with SIMD

The Uno Platform allows you to write an application that works on multiple systems including in the browser thanks to WebAssembly. The Uno Platform uses .NET and the ability to target WebAssembly fixed-width SIMD was added in .NET 7.0.

I wrote the following article that walks you through creating an Uno Platform application and how to work with vectors to leverage SIMD. The article also explains how to compile your application ahead-of-time (AOT) with SIMD support: https://platform.uno/blog/safari-16-4-support-for-webassembly-fixed-width-simd-how-to-use-it-with-c/

Leveraging WebAssembly fixed-width SIMD in Blazor WebAssembly

Because the Uno Platform is using .NET, with a few slight modifications the same code can also be used in Blazor WebAssembly as well.

With both platforms, to take advantage of WebAssembly's fixed-width SIMD support, you need to AOT compile the application but there are a couple differences between how it's done with the Uno Platform versus Blazor.

For Blazor, you'll need to edit your project file and include the following tags in a PropertyGroup tag:

• <RunAOTCompilation>true</RunAOTCompilation>
• <WasmEnableSIMD>true</WasmEnableSIMD>

With the Uno Platform, simply adding Uno's version of the previous tags is enough to trigger the AOT process depending on if your build configuration matches that of the PropertyGroup you added them to (Release mode for example). However, with Blazor, AOT is only triggered when you publish the project.

Also with Blazor, the AOT option on the Publish dialog is on and you can't uncheck it. With Uno you need to make sure you don't check it by accident because doing so will cause an error to be thrown that can only be fixed by deleting a tag from the publish profile file.

A Blazor WebAssembly version of the code can be found here: https://github.com/cggallant/blog_post_code/tree/master/2023-March-BlazorSIMD

Demos

If you'd like to see it in action, the following links are demos built form the code in the article. Note that because these are AOT compiled, they are bigger so they may take a few seconds to download and display especially if you're on an older device or on a slower network.

• Uno Platform: https://sda-bytes.com/uno-wasm-simd/index.html
• Blazor WebAssembly: https://sda-bytes.com/blazor-wasm-simd/

ConFoo 2023 in Review

My experience at ConFoo 2023

On Tuesday, February 21st, I started my journey to Montreal to speak at the ConFoo developer conference for my third time.

Usually, when I travel to the big cities, I try to use public transportation to get to and from the airport. The city I live in isn't very big but I decided to give our transportation system a try anyway.

Unfortunately, for me to get to the airport using this approach, I needed to take two city buses and then a coach bus. It's doable but it takes time and the coach bus only goes to the airport twice a day so the timing didn't allow me to use this approach when I returned.

One highlight of my trip to the airport, however, was a pheasant that graced me with his presence.

The conference was held at the Hotel Bonaventure where we were greeted by over 700 attendees and over 150 sessions in 3 days! Being in Montreal, it was fitting that some of the sessions were also available in French.

The past two times that I spoke at this conference, I only spoke for one session each time. This year, I gave two presentations.

My first presentation was given on the second day of the conference. For this session, I talked about how we're using Docker at Dovico to prototype views, try out different UI frameworks, and help speed up the development of Timesheet.

(source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/confoo/52734935208)

The second presentation that I gave was on the final day of the conference. This time, I walked the audience though creating a Slack bot from start to finish by building a simple hot desk booking system!

(source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/confoo/52733940852)

My slides, notes, and links to the code from my talks can be found in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/cggallant/confoo-2023

As my new friend, Andres Pineda, so correctly articulated in one of his sessions, there's more to a developer conference than just taking in the talks. There's also a networking component to these conferences. When I saw him at the opening party for the speakers, I recognized him but couldn't figure out where from. Later I realized that I had seen him talk online as part of UnoConf and he's one of the contributors to the open-source Uno Platform. We have something in common because I've been privileged to work with Uno and write them several articles for their blog. We were able to connect during the conference.

Speaking of the Uno Platform, while I was in Montreal, I had the opportunity to meet Matthew Mattei in person for lunch. I work with him when writing articles for their blog. I wasn't expecting it but I do appreciate that the Uno Platform sent me home with some swag:

Over the course of the conference, I was fortunate to meet some great people and to take in a number of really good sessions. My only regret is not being able to take in all of the sessions because there are usually 8 other sessions happening at the same time as the session that you're in.

On Saturday, February 25th, I made the journey from the hotel back to the Montreal airport. I thought this was a neat idea as I was walking through the airport to my gate:

It was a great conference and I already miss it. I hope to be able to attend next year's conference and I recommend ConFoo to everyone.

A huge shout out to Yann Larrivée for putting on another amazing event!


As a side note, if you happen to be putting on a developer conference, or know of one that's looking for speakers, let me know because I'd like to speak more. I've started setting up a Sessionize profile but you can also reach me on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

The State of WebAssembly - 2022 and 2023

The State of WebAssembly – 2022 and 2023. For the third year in a row, I've had the privilege of writing an article on the state of WebAssembly. In this article, I started by revisiting developments during 2022 to see if any of my predictions came true and if there were any surprises. Then I tried to predict where I think things will go in 2023.

For the third year in a row, I've had the privilege of writing an article on the state of WebAssembly. In this article, I started by revisiting developments during 2022 to see if any of my predictions came true and if there were any surprises. Then I tried to predict where I think things will go in 2023.

2022 didn't really feel like it had a lot of movement as far as features being released go. However, it did feel like there were a lot of things coming into place for what's to come. I think 2023 is going to be really exciting for WebAssembly and even for JavaScript.

The article can be found here: The State of WebAssembly - 2022 and 2023