I've just added a date range filter to the quick anaysis page of What-Am-I-Doing. My financial year end is at the end of June, and I've only just got round to doing the final invoices for a few customers. I thought that I'd just do a quick check on what I've worked on over the last 6 months to ensure that I've not missed anything.

When I look at my timekeeping data, it alway astounds me that I've worked on so many distinctly identifiable projects - information that would be lost if i was not recording time in an automated way.

And it resulted in 2 additional invoices (one from work done back in January) that could have been missed.

I've just released a new version of What-Am-I-Doing on to the test URL. As a click once application it should (and has) downloaded to the users who are using it from this URL.

The most exciting development is the changes to the interface along the lines of "What are you trying to do" rather than my previous geeky / as it developed interface. The changes have led to some simplification and some duplication - which is intentional.

The main allocation screen has been altered so that it's easier to see the list of customers, and the list other projects. Todays allocated items has moved from the left to the right - which kind of makes sense in a work flow - you're moving stuff from left to right. You can also double click on this grid to allocate directly to a project. This works as people do tend to work on a set of projects in a day. More often than not, the rules have already allocated to the project so its just a case of using the items there. 

I still feel the need to add projects from the main allocation screen. It's really annoy me if, after selecting some entries I realized that I needed to change screen to add a project. On the other hand, the customer / project management screen is much easier to use in isolation when  setting up new customers and projects..

The Rules screen has not changed much - it's just come into the same screen rather than being a dialog. This area probably needs some more work, but that can be for the next release.

Behind the scenes, there's a significant change. On the setup screen you can now change the URL that the data is logged to. The default is, of course, http://www.whatamidoing.co.uk, but if you double click this text box then it'll ask you for a company name. The entered company name is checked against the main database and the appropriate URL is returned. This is important as it means that I can ship 1 application and it can serve both standard customers and the people that are running it on an in-house server. It also means that I maintain the control over who can use an internal / company specific URL.

If you've got any comments on the interface please let me know.

I've been to an Azure Training day today. The training was great, however it it seems that none of what I learnt was any use to me, or if it was then the costs make it prohibitive.

I was looking at it for scalability. What-Am-I-Doing is likely to need some help scaling. It creates a reasonable amount of data - 600 or so lines of data per day - and I need a way to multiply that by the number of users. Azure is not the answer.

SQL Azure costs either $9.99 per month for a 1GB instance, or $99.99 per month for a 10GB instance. Plus I'd have to pay for data transfer.

A 10GB instance is neither cheap, or any more scalable than a standard SQL server licence.

Rewriting the app to use the Azure storage option is a load of work, and to be honest, I can't be bothered. The reason for using a relational database is so that the data can be easily managed and related.

I think that I get, I just don't get it. There was one person who I could see was going to get great benefit from Azure. They run a public organization that each year runs a public survey. In one weekend they get a massive amount of traffc to collect survey results. This is an ideal use of Azure instances - they could just switch on more instances for the weekend, and then switch them all off when the survey is complete.

It was an interesting day, well enough presented, and the hosts (ICS at Basingstoke) were great. It's just a shame that Azure is not there yet.

Having thought about it a while, I've decided to publish the prices for What Am I Doing on the website.

 Have also added pages about the addins available to help with getting better information from Outlook and Visual Studio.

Having got a great deal of value from the Outlook addin I wrote for What-Am-I-Doing, I've written a similar addin for Visual Studio 2008. Lukily there was no changes to the What-Am-I-Doing application. The interface for collecting the information from Outlook was appropriate. All I had to do was write a similar addin that detected when the selected file changes and push that information to the What-Am-I-Doing interface.

The information pushed is the full path of the file being edited.

Anyone with a directory structure for their projects will be able to slip staight into createing rules that automatically allocate the time spent editing files in that project folder to a project.

Anyone without a directory structure that enables them to do this should be fired!

As an aside, the outlook addin I worte a while ago is succesfully allocating almost all of the time I spend on email to customers.

I had a presentation to a potential client today. A couple of weeks ago I got three pople a the client (they're solicitors by the way) to install What-Am-I-Doing, and it's been logging their time since.

I woke up in a panic at 5:30 this morning - I realised that while what it was doing was clever, appropriate and significant, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to communicate this to the potential client. What I had to show them was not compelling!

This resulted in the "Visualize" screen being created.

 This scrreen has lots of functionality. The main parts Are:

• View the full 24 hours at the top of the screen
• Zoom in to an hour to se it in detail.
• Click on the unallocated time and allocate it to a project
• Use the outlook view to allocate time based on appointments.

One of the exciting things implemented on this screen is the "Sequential" button. This runs through the day and allocates unallocated time based on what happens before and after. Some logs are just not specifically identifyable as there is no project specific information, and this enables them to be automatically allocated. It's probably increased the amount of automatic allocation by 15 to 20 percent.

 Anyway, with the visualization screen, the meeting with the client went really well. It meant that they 'got it' almost immediately.

I've been looking for ways to get more information in to What-Am-I-Doing.

The first step was to grab information about the files locked by the target application.

A significant piece of the puzzle that was missing was time spent in outlook. Email consumes about 30% of my time, and I'd really like to be able to allocate this to projects.

The solution (for me at least) was to create an addin to Outlook that uses the event triggerd when a selected item changes to identify the selected email item. Once I have the item, i can get the sender, recipient and subject of the email. I use and API call to send this information to What-Am-I-Doing.

Using the "Other Info" field of the rules, I can automatically allocate time to a customer / project because I'm dealing with an email that is from that customer. It doesn't matter whether I'm reading an email, or writing one. It also doesn't matter whether the email is being read in it's own window or in the preview pane.

If you want to download the addin, you can get it from the what-am-i-doing website. You have to register / login to download it. I guess it's not much use to you if you're not running the app anyway.

While What-Am-I-Doing has been succesfully starts on XP and Windows 7, the user account control stuff has stopped it starting succesfully on vista machines if you're not the administrator.

There's a few people on the web that have been addressing this problem, the info in this post allowed me to fix this issue.

The key things are:

• On first run create a link to the appref-ms file, and put it in the SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run registry key
• Switch off automatic updates
• Manage the update in the program.

The only problem with this approach is that if the app is uninstalled then the link is left in the registry key.

This has probably been the most difficult technical problem that I've ever had to solve!

I've been trying to get additional information into What-Am-I-Doing about what's going on on the computer at any time. Any application, particularly things like word and excel, have a current open file. A lock is maintained on the file. This should mean that I can identify the full path of the file being edited.

It took about 2 weeks work to tie it down and make it reliable, however it's now been implemented in the current version of What-Am-I-Doing.

To use this information, I've added a third information field to all logs to hold the "Other Info". I've also added an additional field to the rules so that this information can be used for auto-allocation.

I work regularly with a fantastic graphic designer who's becoming excellent at silverlight. As one of her exercises, she's created a silverlight animation for me to put on the home page of What-Am-I-Doing. A while ago we talked about our working environment being like a set of room - each room represents an application where we work, and we spend time in each room and carry information and data between those rooms to enable us to produce something of value. Demonstrating this as a concept seems quite difficult to me, how ever she's managed it really well.

Have a look at the silverlight animation that she produced for me.

We do, occasionally, have a chuckle about the acceleration between rooms...