Microsoft Office Accounting Professional crashes with custom invoice

We've had an irritating issue recently with our accounting system, when creating the custom invoices.

Basically, every time we tried to create a custom invoice with Microsoft Office Accounting the entire application would crash for no obvious reason.

Checking the exception's stack trace it would talk about get_item which lead me down one path but the answer was actually (and irritatingly) more simple than that -we had a couple of merged cells in the footer of the totals table. Silly I know but it made all the difference!

So if you're getting a crash with Microsoft Office Accounting when creating your invoices, check for merged cells first!

IE classes DDD feedback site as a phishing site…

This one made me laugh today, Chris Anderson alerted me to it but you would have thought the MS guys would have picked up on it...

Incidentally, it's the first time I've seen this message on any site...

What’s Google missing this time?

I guess it's something to do with fair competition etc but I found this rather interesting when adding a client to Google's Business Listing the other day.

Can anyone else spot a missing payment option?

How about "Google Checkout"?

A new email domain scam to watch out for

This came through to one of our clients today, I thought I'd share it as I've not seen it before and it made me chuckle. Note the placeholder: <Online since>

Thought you might like to share it with your clients :)

The remote host closed the connection. The error code is 0x80072746

We've just moved a couple of our sites onto a new server and have intermittently started to receive the error "The remote host closed the connection. The error code is 0x80072746.", usually around the same time as "Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.".

As the infrastructure hadn't changed we were able to rule out network issues, hardware issues (it was an upgrade) and nothing had changed on the code level so we put it down to the new backup routine.

On a little Googling, I found a few sites that were pointing to (among other things) the Request length and Executiuon time which got me thinking, in this particular site there is a lot of data being sent/retrieved and it could be maxing out the request. After a little more digging I found this article from Microsoft about the httpRuntime Element and I quote

This time-out applies only if the debug attribute in the compilation element is False. To help to prevent shutting down the application while you are debugging, do not set this time-out to a large value.

Although I didn't recall making any changes to the site, when updating the database configuration settings, I did change the compilation element to false. So far increasing the executionTimeout value appears to have fixed the issue.

WSDL returning a valid response but object is null

We had an interesting problem the other day while integrating with a web service hosted on an apache server. Every time we called the WSDL methods we could see a valid request being sent and a valid response being returned (ok there were a few syntax errors but nothing that would stop it converting) but despite this every time, without fail, it would return null at code level.

The solution was actually amazingly simple. In short, since our last flurry with web services we've upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 and installed ReSharper (see below for how that's relevant). In VS2008 they've sneakily added a new menu "Add Service Reference" and although it's in the same menu location and a similar wording etc does something different. If you add your WSDL reference this way it will more than likely fail.

To add a "Web Reference" in Visual Studio 2008 follow the instructions below and hopefully you won't go down the same routes that I did trying to debug the XML...

Click the "Add Service Reference" menu option (obviously!)

The screen below should appear, instead of entering the address of the web service into the address bar, click the advanced button at the bottom (highlighted)

That'll then bring up the screen below, on which you need to click the "Add Web Reference" button at the bottom.

You should then be presented with the usual "Add Web Reference" screen (see below).

Why did I mention ReSharper? Well I've notice that as well as adding to the IDE they've also updated some of the menu items, most noticeably "Go to Definition" which is now "go to Declaration" (see below) so I figured this new menu option was thanks to them.

ReSharper:

Without ReSharper:

So the next time your WSDL is returning a null object even though a valid response is being retrieved, check how you added it in Visual Studio,.

Keeping people happy

Sometimes it's the little things that keep workers happy so when I saw the little surprise that online conference callers Powwownow do with their cards I thought I'd share.

When you sign up at www.powwownow.co.uk you get the option of being sent your number on a card to hand around to your friends, clients and anyone else. It comes through the post in a little card holder (mine was missing our spare cards but hey). If you rip it open, on some of the folds, they've put jokes for the people putting them together! Look:

Just like the jokes on lollipop sticks -costs next to nothing (in this case I would imagine it was free) but makes that works day just a little more entertaining :).

Knowing what to say in meetings -Part 1

It's important when going into any meeting with a client that you prepare (everyone know's the old motto "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail") but how can you do that? First of all, consider what sort of meeting it is, find out who's going to the meeting and why they're there. Once you have this information you're good to go.

The first client meeting

Although you may be a little nervous at the first couple of meetings, this is perfectly normal, just remember that they've asked you there so they're interested in what you have to say -after all, you're the expert!

It's very likely that they client will want to know more information about your company (not you!) so having a short synopsis of your company that can act as a base is very important. For instance, The Site Doctor has something along the lines of:

The Site Doctor specialises in creating bespoke web based applications centred on your business requirements. We work with some of the world's largest and most successful organisations in both the public and private sectors as well as a wide selection of SME's.

By combining specialist technology skills, with excellence in design, usability, accessibility and a unique business management process, we are able to deliver results-driven solutions including websites, intranets, Content Management Systems, enterprise portals, business applications and extranets.

As well as developing major applications, our skills in marketing and communications ensures that we deliver a consistent message across a number of interactive communication channels and also integrate your objectives within an off-line environment.

Since establishing The Site Doctor, we have encouraged all those involved to participate in the relevant online communities to not only improve their own knowledge and expertise but also give something back and help further other's careers.

To be fair, this monolog changes depending on who we're meeting and the general feeling of the meeting, for instance if you're addressing a panel then we might leave off the SME part and replace it with a list of your clients as they're more likely to be interested in your larger work.

Whatever your monolog is, it should be short and concise (I can digress somewhat sometimes when introducing The Site Doctor), make sure it's no longer than 2 minutes as if they want to know more, they'll ask.

Make sure you've prepared a short list of questions for the client either about themselves or the project they have in mind, some of these you might already have answers to so prepare questions on the responses. Here are a couple of standard ones:

• What are you looking to achieve with this project -do you have any goals/objectives already defined such as number of visitors, % increase in sales etc?
• Similar to above, a good question is "What would make you consider this project a success?" -then link it to their targets above
• Do you have any literature, designs or mood boards that would help with this project already prepared?
• What are your timescale's for this project?
• Are there any events or meetings that you would like to have this project completed in time for (99/100 there's a trade show coming up that they forgot to tell you about without being prompted
• Have you thought about a budget for this work? (They'll most likely say no, you tell us what it'll cost and we'll decide -there's a way around that which I'll blog about later)

If you manage to get this information (and any other relevant information) you're off to a good start with your project! Don't fret too much though if you can't get all the information or you don't manage to get the budget from the client the first time around, there are ways around it.

The most important thing about the first client meeting is that both parties feel at ease with one and other as this will form a good base to build the project on. If you're liked by the client they're more likely to do business with you -especially if they have to pitch you to their superiors.

My next post will blog about the project meetings and client feedback/sign-off meetings. At some point I'll blog about my successful networking tips and how to get a budget out of a client but that's enough for today!

What do you say when in your first meeting? Do you have any tips for what to say in meetings? Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear your thoughts.