MKMlabs

Using .NET to program a web application? Need that web application to run on Internet Explorer on Windows Devices? Do yourself a massive favour and read on!

Whilst developing MyKnowledgeMap’s Multi-Port Mobile product, I encountered a series of intermittent and strange problems with Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile devices. Often the problems seemed quite simple but I found barely any online discussion or suggested solutions. This meant it often took a lot of detective work to get to the bottom of them!

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I’ve recently been working on MyKnowledgeMap’s "working from home" portal, an area of our website dedicated to helping our staff maintain their normal working environment, when outside of the office, and one of the options we decided to allow was for staff members to VPN into the office and then remote desktop into their machine.

This would allow staff members to leave their work computer in one state, and then from outside of the office instantly resume the work they were doing. One of the issues raised from this would be the fact that computers would be switched on continuously, not something we want to be doing given MyKnowledgeMap’s green drives in other areas.

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Before venturing into the world of web service definitions and standardised open APIs it was important for us to not only prove there was a requirement for the kind of service we were proposing but to prove that the technologies used for the Multi-Port framework were capable of supporting the architecture we were looking at.

Luckily we'd already built multiple e-portfolio tools on top of the Multi-Port platform and many of these combined components built with Adobe Flex, connected to the platform using web services.

With these services in place, and a new installation of the Multi-Port platform with all authentication layers removed, it was easy to exploit the core functionality of the platform using simple HTTP GET requests.

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Titanium, from Appcelerator, is a new type of development environment that helps leverage web-based development and design skills in new areas such as desktop and mobile applications. I've been part of the Titanium Mobile closed beta for a month or so now and have been finding my feet with Javascript based development across a number of platforms, including iPhone and Android.

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A research paper co-authored by MyKnowledgeMap has won the Award for Leading Practice in Learning Impact at the European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) Conference 2010. The research paper discusses the Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS) project, a mobile assessment system which is being used by five Yorkshire Universities to support Health and Social Care students on work-based practice. The paper was also nominated for 'Best Research Paper in Conference'.

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