On June 22, 2010, Minsk Institute of Management, Belarus Ruby on Rails User Group, and Altoros held a roundtable on the future of Ruby on Rails development and career success in IT. A number of Rails experts who were involved in the first RoR projects in Belarus attended the seminar and shared their expertise.

During the roundtable, graduates and Rails newbies had an opportunity to ask expert Ruby on Rails developers about the demand for RoR in Europe, the ways to find new projects, the employment opportunities, and how to start Ruby on Rails development.

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On June 2, 2009, the round table on Java UI Automated Testing was held by Sun Microsystems during the WebConf-09 conference with the assistance of Altoros, a global software delivery acceleration specialist. Alexandre Iline (Sun Microsystems, Russia), together with select experts from the Belarus Java User Group, discussed the main challenges that occur during the automation of Java application interface testing. Throughout the meeting, Alexandre actively shared the experience he has gained working on such popular Java projects as NetBeans, JavaFX Designer, and Java Store.

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During May 13-15, Altoros assisted Adobe in holding a number of presentations for RIA developers in Minsk, Belarus. On May 13, Cornel Creanga (Adobe, Romania) participated in a joint meeting of Java and Flash/Flex developers, speaking on Adobe Flex, BlazeDS, and LiveCycle Data Services technologies, as well as integration with Java. On May 14-15, he presented Adobe Flash Catalyst and Flash Media Server at one of the local conferences.

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Stockholm, Sweden – During March 18-19, 2009, Altoros was a part of the official Belarusian delegation that discussed cooperation between Belarus and Sweden in the IT industry at the governmental level.

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On March 19, 2009, Microsoft Silverlight 3 technology was officially presented to Belarusian .NET developers during the local .NET User Group meeting, which was organized by the Minsk Institute of Management and Altoros. Sergiy Baydachnyy of Microsoft Ukraine demonstrated the new capabilities of Silverlight 3, spoke on the scheduled release dates of the technology, and answered the numerous questions.

The session was followed by the speech of Andrei Varanovich, Microsoft MVP, who demonstrated the new version of Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0—the technology for defining, executing, and managing workflows. More than 130 participants took part in the event and 53 more attended the presentation the next day in Brest, another Belarusian city.

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On December 18, 2008, a joint meeting of the Belarus Java User Group and the Adobe Flash Platform User Group was held with the support of the Minsk Institute of Management and Altoros. Cornel Creanga, Java Technical Lead at Adobe, for the first time presented Adobe Flex in Belarus and spoke on its integration with Java back-ends, while Alexander Zuev, Technology Evangelist at SUN Microsystems, delivered the first review of the new JavaFX development platform for Belarusian developers.

More than 120 IT specialists from Minsk, Homel, and Vitebsk attended the conference, a dozen more followed the live broadcast online.

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Read about the main achievements of Altoros during Q3 2008.

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Altoros is now officially a member of Belarus Hi-Tech Park. It is a government-supported environment aimed at helping promising software companies to adopt the latest technologies and grow faster. The association exists starting from 2005 and has established strong ties with other similar organizations around the globe. For Altoros, it is a good chance to find new partnerships (both commercial and technology-driven) and become even more dynamic and mature at the same time.

New technology expertise

Between July and September, Altoros technology-specific teams also completed a number of projects and gained new technology expertise.

• .NET Framework
  Altoros’ .NET team is currently working on a .NET-based “Training Diary” project for active sports-loving and devoted people. This web-based service lets sportsmen plan their training strategies and store the data on the workouts they have already performed, planned, or skipped. The application also has the Coach functionality, which enables users to train sportsmen, track their workouts, define training plans and strategies, and analyze statistics to boost training efficiency. Sportsmen can be divided into teams and either have their own coach each, the community coach for a few teams, or a global coach, who trains any sportsman within the instance of the Diary.

  In the future, the team also plans to develop the desktop version of the Diary and introduce more community features to enable user communication via forums, blogs, file exchange, groups, etc. In the course of development, aside from .NET Framework 3.5 (WCF, ASP.NET), Altoros’s team will use Windows Server 2003/2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008.

• Ruby on Rails
  Altoros completed the first stage of a Ruby on Rails-based mobile advertising project for INTXT Exchange. The project provides a wide range of advertising options, enabling clients to create and manage advertising campaigns, view reports, and submit payments online. The advertising partners can also set their own publishing properties and receive payments. With this system, anyone can register to receive advertisements via SMS to his or her phone and get paid for looking through the received ads.
• Windows Mobile
  Altoros team released the Beta version of its Windows Mobile-based logistic application. The project is designed for technicians, allowing them to see their workorders and items needed to complete the job, handle their balance on several stocks, and register time and mileage for the workorders on their PDA. At the same time, managers in the office will be able to control workorders and see where each technician is located at that very moment. Among others, the team used .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and SQL Compact Edition 3.5 to develop this system.
• Adobe Flex
  Our dedicated team of Adobe Flex developers launched the public version of Apatar On-Demand data integration solution. Apatar On-Demand is a hosted pre-built service that synchronizes data between Salesforce.com CRM and desktop QuickBooks accounting software. It makes it possible to set recurring or one-time synchronization of account, contact, order, and opportunity data, while preserving links between tables in both Salesforce.com and QuickBooks. The team implemented Flex 2/3, Action Script 3, FlexUni, and other technologies to deliver Apatar On-Demand.

Supporting technology community

Altoros organized the latest Belarus .NET User Group meeting, which was held on September 11, 2008, and featured a keynote speaker from Microsoft. The meeting garnered the attendance of more people than ever before in the two-year history of the user group. Almost one hundred applications were received and 64 specialists took part in the conference. Sergiy Baydachnyy of Microsoft Ukraine delivered a technical review of the latest additions to Internet Explorer 8, after which Andrei Varanovich (Microsoft MVP) spoke on the key capacities of SharePoint 2007.

The case of the day: a subsystem for entries

Here, we would like to share with you some technical challenges our team encountered and the creative solutions we came up with.

Every time one tries to create a WorkItem through the WorkItemTracking API in TFS’05, TFS’05 SP1, and TFS’08, the GCHandle error occurs, which is an obstacle for many .NET developers worldwide. Our .NET team solved this challenge by creating an IIS Application Pool for each tire of the app. After that, our team granted IIS Application Pool user the rights to write in YOUR CACHE FOLDER catalogue and in places where the access to the WorkItemStore API was required in the configuration.

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Altoros Systems supported the latest Belarus .NET User Group meeting, which was held on September 11, 2008. The meeting garnered the attendance of more people than ever before in the two-year history of the user group. Almost one hundred applications were received and 64 developers took part in the conference. Sergiy Baydachnyy of Microsoft Ukraine delivered a technical review of the latest additions to IE 8, after which Andrei Varanovich (Microsoft MVP) spoke on the key capacities of SharePoint 2007.

“Themed meetings involving leading software development companies make it possible not only to learn the news of the IT industry, but also to get a glimpse of what the industry will be like tomorrow, as well as to make a contribution to forming it,” noted Dr. Nikolay Susha, Rector of the Minsk Institute of Management. “I hope that the past meeting of Belarus .NET User Group was our first, but not last, step in this direction.”

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Chicopee, MA—On March 4, 2008, Altoros finalized the development of innovative employee performance assessment system. The proprietary metric-based tool enables customers to be in control of software quality in real time during the development life cycles. Performance management system allows to assess distributed software engineering team members by several key criteria, such as technical, personal, project metrics, and so on.

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The first meeting of the Belarus Java User Group was held on February 7, 2008, at the Belarusian State University in Minsk, Belarus (Eastern Europe). Speakers from MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database vendor, conducted the presentations on MySQL’s Connector/J for Java, MySQL cluster, and MySQL replication.

62 Java developers were able to attend the conference, while the organizers received more than 120 registrations. Altoros, a global software delivery acceleration specialist, and Apatar, a provider of open-source tools for data integration, were proud to organize the event.

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