Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (eCRM or BBEC as it seems to be called interchangeably) is enormous. It is a big change to The Raiser’s Edge but then that is not surprising as it is not actually the replacement for The Raiser’s Edge 7. It is an application way beyond RE 7. Nevertheless you cannot help comparing the two as long as there is no RE8 to compare to. As a software developer it is a whole new paradigm. Of course even if you know how to develop software customisations for BBEC you still need to know how the program works from a user perspective. That is why I am not only learning a new development environment but I am learning a whole new program. Some of the concepts are very similar, some are different. As I learn I have come across some quite small changes that, for whatever reason, fill me with a “wow that’s great” feeling. These are not earth shattering improvements but just things that I am sure people will appreciate. So this post is dedicated to the small differences. Read the rest of this entry »

I have just returned from day one of the Blackbaud’s 2009 Relationship Management Conference. For those of you who were at my presentation then thank you for coming. If you were not there or you did not get a USB drive then you can view the whole presentation on Zeidman Development at this link.

I have been doing some work with C# recently and  decided that despite what people say C# is as equally verbose as VB.NET. It is true if you look at the number of characters in a VB program compared to the equivalent C# program there will be a greater number but you seem to get a lot more automatic inserts with VB than you do with C#. C# seems to have a lot more punctuation that VB too adding up to a lot more typing than I was used to.

Read the rest of this entry »