Update for the last six weeks until December 22nd, 2011

• Overall we picked up speed again in development over the past months. The newer team members contribute to OpenPetra to a larger extent now and are making good progress.
• We have released OpenPetra Version 0.2.16 Alpha on December 22nd, 2011. Previously Version 0.2.14 Alpha was released on 10 November 2011. For details see http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg/
• ChristianK was and is busy preparing for the visit of eight students and a professor from Calvin College, U.S.A (http://www.calvin.edu/). He is co-ordinating the lining up of various projects and will be involved with several projects during their two-week inter-term overseas experience in Carlisle, England. A good mix of programming and research & development awaits them. We are looking forward to them contributing to OpenPetra!
• ChristianK finished work on the framework for data validation which he made a start on earlier this year. This framework helps the software engineers to check data entered in all kinds of screens against certain rules, e.g. a number entered must be positive, a date entered must lie in the future, etc. The framework makes this easy and consistent for the software engineers and the users get consistent and helpful messages across the application if data they entered isn’t quite right. Validation messages can of course be translated. They feature unique error codes so support personnel who can’t read the validation message a user is contacting them about because it is in a language they can’t understand can know what it means by looking up the error code’s meaning.
• MatthiasS is following the testing strategy and started testing the main screens and functionality of the partner module. He will continue working on different aspects of testing and quality assurance and invest some time setting up test cases to run automatically. Part of it will be done in co-operation with the Calvin students.
• WolfgangB has implemented both the Local Partner Data Tab and the Family Members Tab on the Partner Edit Screen. He is now starting to design and implement screens and functionality for extracts in the Partner Module with the prospect of a group of students helping with parts of this in January.
• TimI has been working on the Accounts Payable subsystem, adding functionality to that which already existed.
• AlanP completed the four Maintain Table screens and has since worked on the Local Data Labels screen for Partner and Personnel which had some increased complexity and is almost finished now.
• ChristopherT finished work on the processing of the Admin Fees and moved onto Budgeting. He is converting the Budget segments of the Petra 2.x program code into the C# programming language. Phase 1 of this work is now completed, Phase 2 (import/export and autogenerate) has been started.
• JoachimM has almost finished work on the Debian Package. He had to reduce his current involvement in order to focus on his diploma thesis for the next few months.
• TimotheusP merged the branch that uses the Benerator open source software to generate random partner addresses for OpenPetra. This is useful for testing and demonstration purposes. ThomasS has finished his work on that branch.
• TimotheusP made huge speed improvements to the build system, making life much easier again for the developers.
• TimotheusP completed the switch to .Net 4.0, both on Windows and Linux
• TimotheusP worked on a nightly build server for OpenPetra standalone. It now included NUnit tests and produces a Windows standalone installer for each build. This will help a lot with testing. You can find the latest untested build at http://ci-win.solidcharity.com/job/OpenPetraBuildWin/
• TimotheusP was working on support of Online Registration for ExtJS4. Still much work to do to get the Online Backend to work with ext.net and Mono 2.10
• TimotheusP did work on a Linux remote developer’s machine, to offer remote access to people interested in joining the project. Details will follow soon!
• Sqlite on Linux is now supported again

Thank you for your interest and support, WolfgangB for the OpenPetra developers