I have been using Visual Studio 2010 for a short while now ever since the prospect of developing workflows for Enterprise CRM became a reality. One thing that I noticed when working with The Raiser’s Edge API however is that it is much faster to type out everything.
Continue reading Subtle changes in Visual Studio 2010 make Raiser’s Edge API less typing
Zeidman Development are pleased to announce the release (well re-release) of our Audit Trail customisation. The Audit Trail tracks changes made to records on The Raiser’s Edge. The three versions come in varying degrees of complexity.
Audit Trail Free – tracks constituent deletions and reports them to a log file
Audit Trail Basic – tracks constituent deletions, additions and updates and records them in a table that can be reported on, filter by, sliced and diced etc
Audit Trail Professional – does all of the above but also tracks gifts, relationships, actions and participants.
All three versions tell you who made the change and when. They also tell you the previous values and the updated values.
Audit Trail no longer requires the VBA module – so the free version is truly free!
Check out an overview video. Warning – it’s cute.
For more information including a breakdown in the differences between the versions and to download Audit Trail check out the product page on our website
A few days ago I put a question on both Blackbus and the official Blackbaud forums asking if anybody had written a plug-in in C#. I have written a number of customisations in C# (VB.NET is my most common programming language – although I do enjoy using C#) but I had never written a plug-in before. It has always been a web service of application of some kind. I managed to work out how to do it and thought that I would share my solution here. Continue reading A Raiser’s Edge C# Plugin
I am sitting in the plane on my way back to the UK following the Blackbaud conference in Washington DC. There were no new announcements about the generation eight products (few seem to refer to it as The Raiser’s Edge 8), no new major applications and no new major personnel changes (that I was made aware of). However there was a new branding. The new logo should represent a more open Blackbaud. At first I was unsure about the design. It seemed somewhat cartoon like but now it has grown on me. To put the record straight the tag-line is not as in this post’s title but rather “Your purpose -> Our passion”. I ought to remember it. The free WIFI from Blackbaud at the conference used this as the username and password. Instead I managed to use each permutation available. If we take this tag-line at face value what can we expect?
Continue reading Blackbaud – My purpose is their passion
If you don’t receive my somewhat irregular newsletter (and you can sign up for it here if you want…) then you will, perhaps not have heard that I will be speaking in both London and Washington DC over the next couple of weeks.
I shall be speaking on the differences between customisations on the Infinity platform versus those on The Raiser’s Edge platform. I have a several customisations created for the conferences one of them an integration with Mailchimp, the email delivery provider. The session is not going to be technical (there will be no code) so it is open to everyone. If you are going to be at either of the conferences then it would be great to meet you.
I am looking forward to some exciting announcements from Blackbaud. Here are a couple of my predictions:
Look forward to seeing you there!
Most people who regularly read this blog will hopefully (for their sake) never have to encounter this issue that has plagued me ever since I upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 (and then later Visual Studio 2008) and Vista (and then later Windows 7). Working with setup and deployment project is supposed to make life easier but I have had nothing but trouble with them.
Continue reading Visual Studio Setup and Deployment issue on Windows 7 and Vista Solved
I am currently working on a project involving two different Raiser’s Edge databases. One of the problems that I thought that I would have was having to first open one instance of Raiser’s Edge only to find that I needed a piece of information from the other one. I would have to exit and sign out of the one and then log in to the other one. This to-ing and fro-ing, I thought, would drive me crazy.
Continue reading Multiple Versions of The Raiser’s Edge Open at one time
I am currently working on a project where I need to copy a gift record from one constituent to another. There are 213 fields on the regular gift object i.e. CGift. That is without looking at any of the other areas of the gift such as attributes, notepads, etc. It would take a lot of typeing to copy between each field so to do this I use the meta data that is supplied with each object. Continue reading Using meta data to copy records
If you did not get Zeidman Development’s newsletter (you can sign up here) then you would not have heard about our latest plug-in – The Mergician. The Mergician allows you to merge constituent records en masse. Currently The Raiser’s Edge allows you to merge two records together. Built off of the same functionality, The Mergician allows you to merge all your duplicates in one process. Continue reading Globally Merge Constituents using The Mergician
I have been doing some preparation for my two Blackbaud conference sessions (in London and in Washington D.C.). Each year I present at the Blackbaud conferences I develop some new code to show. This year is no exception and without going into too much detail I am sure this will not disappoint those who are excited to see what can be done on the Infinity platform that The Raiser’s Edge platform code only ever dream of doing!
The SDK has some great integration with Visual Studio. For starters you are given very many template items to build your own components from. Intellisense works well in both the XML specs that you have to write and also in any corresponding .NET code. Continue reading Visual Studio and Blackbaud Enterprise CRM