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Every good service starts from an appointment, regardless it's a dental clinic or car workshop. At this point, the business turns contact with a customer into bountiful relationships either reputation loss. Thus, it should be clear, providing vast information, and friendly with every user, including seniors and non-tech people.

As the digitized world becomes closer, it is a must for today to extend and move your business online. One of such niches we are going to discuss today is online learning.

When a customer chooses a provider of software development services, one of the important selection criteria is the balance between team expertise and solution budget. If the planned project is quite large or complicated, IT companies often include a business analyst to the development team. And it’s the moment when the customer meets a question: why should we add a business analyst?

No matter how much we try to prevent it, problems and issues have a way of making themselves present in our business. It’s unavoidable, almost non-negotiable. While it is a normal occurrence, we must do what we can to make sure they’re only experienced once.

Covid–19 has been front and center of our lives in 2020, wreaking havoc in both the offline and online world. When it comes to the offline world, lockdowns have become the new normal, people are being quarantined left, and right, businesses are shutting down, remote-working is in, a mask is mandatory, and so forth. 

While the entire world is focused on the usual public clouds the private ones are behind the scene. We’re going to look into that to figure out the purpose of usage.

In this article, we want to share an idea of reducing the costs for support and development of the outdated app. As we all know, regular updates of mobile applications is a vital part of their lifecycle, which allows keeping market positions, implementing additional features, and of course, improving financial performance. So, when you find it's a high time to update your service, here's a possible way to make it better.

While managing our website, I've got a question: how to spend less time on different minor actions. Such as digging into the pile of alike pictures, which is one of the most painful things for everyone managing content. So, I got interested in Digital Assets Management applications - the software solutions used to catalog, store and, sometimes, edit multimedia files - and discovered it using Digizuite as an example.

If you've already spent several minutes on UKAD's blog, you should get out that we love Umbraco. Overall, it's a very flexible CMS allowing us to use it for literally everything. For example, e-Learning solutions in which we are masters.

Incepted in 2005, UKAD is based in Sheffield, England. It is an outsourcing software development business, owning its R & D and engineering teams based in Ukraine and Poland. Further, UKAD consists of professionals proficient in their respective areas so as to provide the clients with a full range of IT services.

On the testing processes of medium and large-sized projects, there is a lot of repetitive work for regression tests on each iteration of the development process. To reduce the expenses for QA processes, as a rule, companies use testing automation.

While we were testing the UKAD web site manually, we’ve defined that there are over a hundred web pages, so manual reviewing all of them for each deployment takes too much time. Also, people can just make mistakes while doing a big amount of monotonous work. That’s why we decided to use a pixel-by-pixel comparison tool aShot, which allows testing our GUI state automatically

Since the last weeks of 2019 the world is facing a new outbreak caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. We already can see how service proposals are changing to meet the emerging requirements for safety and reduce the effect of flight prohibitions in many countries. And working on this article we hope to successfully predict how things may go on.

Article is updating!

As every professional software development company, UKAD pays much attention to the quality of our solutions. We asked one of our Quality Assurance experts to explain the way from a raw piece of code to an excellent product.

As each software development company, from time to time we pay some attention to SSL certificates. Such protection is a de-facto standard of modern web development as well as a very good practice which requires a constant expenditure of time and effort.

Specializing in .NET and PHP technologies and delivering quality projects within time and cost constraints accelerate UKAD amongst the top web service providers at GoodFirms

Every year many companies either developing eCommerce projects or operating play an interesting game: the hottest trends prediction. And this year UKAD gladly takes part too and presents its list of the hottest trends in eCommerce-2020! We hope, this list will be useful for everyone reading it.

What is the most important problem faced by each technology-related startup? For the USA, Canada, and Western Europe it will be RnD costs. Talking not only about Silicon Valley with all these 6 digit salaries but also other locations it's very expensive to develop your product at home when you live in Sweden or the United States. What about 100+ USD hourly rates at below-the-average quality? Easy! In fact, high living standards lead to equally high labor costs, commonly unbearable for most of all except the grandes such as Facebook. So, here comes an obvious idea: outsource it!

As we know, informational security is extremely important, especially when we talk about any money-related operations. Now, most of all users realize that they should set strong passwords or even utilize 2FA with banking apps. But here come many more cybersecurity issues aiming your business such as unsafe credentials sharing...

UKAD was once again highlighted as a top performing company on one of Clutch’s annual reports. This time, Clutch listed UKAD among the best development firms in France — a huge honor for our team. We appreciate this recognition and look forward to seeing how it helps us grow as a company.

CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. It's a pattern that performs segregate operations that read data from operations that update data by using separate interfaces. This can maximize performance, scalability, and security. Supports the evolution of the system over time through higher flexibility, and prevents update commands from causing merge conflicts at the domain level.

The question “is it worth to use Docker containers for Windows” is still valid. Due to Microsoft .NET had solved problems where containers rock in PHP and NodeJS worlds.

So why should we use containers for .NET?

There are several reasons...

We are thrilled to announce that we have been listed in Clutch’s 2019 Report among the top .NET developers on their platform.

E-Commerce is an ever growing industry. Launching your web shop, although being a very wide-spread business idea, it still is could be quite profitable.

E-commerce website development service is very popular Client request for UKAD team .  The time or budget limits could be a constraint for a Client to start a custom webshop project. In case when none of the cloud platforms meets the customization requirements, our development team could use CMS systems in conjunction with a third party eShop packages.

UKAD Aligns Project Experience and Platform Expertise for Episerver Digital Experience Cloud Customers.

We completed a thorough certification process to earn the Associate Partner status in Episerver’s Partner Success Program and to join as a qualified, value-add seller of Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ platform.

My top set of plugins that helps to boost Umbraco with few clicks adding SEO capabilities, improving editor experience and simplifying development and reduce maintenance.

Umbraco is flexible and developer friendly CMS. Here some tips on how to optimize the editorial experience.

Each project has its own requirements and goals that influence on a CMS choice. When Umbraco is the best alternative?

Bellow I will try to clear out the main reasons to decide on Umbraco.

Considering Umbraco for a new project you might want to know, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the potential web platform. And if the choice of Umbraco it is the right decision. Here we will try to share our view about Umbraco pros and cons.

We discovered a revolutionary solution for Umbraco performance, that I want to describe in this article.
Here you WON’T find tips and tricks “How to change 10 Umbraco settings to make it work faster”. We implemented a completely new approach that solved all server-side performance issues for us forever.

Azure Blockchain Workbench is a new cloud service platform that reduces time and effort needed for a blockchain network configuration and deployment. The tool is quite handy for blockchain projects usage.

It supports the main blockchain platforms and can be easily integrated with existing systems and applications utilizing Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps.

The article considers the pros and cons of ASP.NET Core based applications development from a business point of view.

React Native is a JavaScript framework to build mobile apps that are rendered natively for iOS and Android. Build once the application run on both iOS and Android devices.

The article doesn’t aim to be a comprehensive overview either of the Sketch nor of Figma. There is plenty of articles on the internet that do it great. We just want to consider important points of our workflow in UKAD.

UKAD needs to work hard at standing out among the crowd. We do this by delivering quality products to our clients and by striving to always use the most up-to-date tech practices when building for the businesses we serve.

The Internet gives QA engineer a wide choice of tools to optimize the site. Some of them are paid (f. ex., Netpeaker Spider) others are free like Xenu. While choosing the tool I always consider free options first. But despite a huge advantage of being payment-free, such programs are usually limited in their features and specialization. Therefore, to achieve the best result and cover the whole tasks log QA engineer could combine two or more tools.

In this article, I would like to consider a tool that allows you to facilitate the work of the system administrator and make monitoring client servers more cost-effective and resultative. The overview will be helpful for system administrators, DevOps specialists, customers who cooperate with IT companies, developers. 

Here we want to start with some React Native critics, sharing the opinion of our front-end developer after he got acquainted with RN.

CSS Flex-Box layout is a tool for placing blocks on a page. Flex-box is designed to optimize the layout of the elements, unlike the float. Flex-box makes it easy to align elements horizontally and vertically, change the direction and order of display elements, it also allows you to stretch blocks to the entire height of the parent or to lower them to the bottom edge.

Android and iOS development: 4 differences

The only official Windows IDE to work with Android apps is Android Studio. There are some unofficial iOS simulators for Windows to test iOS apps, but their reliability isn’t guaranteed by Apple.

CSS Grid technology appeared in 2011, but interest is still growing. This article is a small technical guide to the most interesting features and functions.

This article will be useful for frontend developers as well as for other web development and design specialists.

Testing is an important part of software development. Its purpose is to provide information about product quality. Automated testing uses software to simplify the testing process and verify results.

If you are familiar with the Umbraco CMS, you’ve probably heard of a webshop package called Ucommerce. Even if you haven’t, it’s not hard to guess its intended purpose. Ucommerce is an enterprise-grade solution which seamlessly merges the content creation possibilities of the Umbraco CMS with powerful and modern commercial functions. The name of this platform reflects the modern trend in business, which can be summarized by one word - ubiquitous. The idea of this approach is to make trading simple and accessible for everyone.

Medical organizations currently face a significant challenge when integrating systems and processes across the care continuum. Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have become a mission-critical component for delivering appropriate and timely high-quality care. They function as the single source of truth for providers and patients. Healthcare providers need their EHR and supporting infrastructure to be always running and compliant with strict regulations for health data security and privacy.

Ionic is a technology that lets you build full-fledged apps for both iOS and Android using your existing web development skills and without needing any deep platform-specific knowledge. Some restrictions apply, but in general, you only need to be familiar with Angular (a popular web framework) to get started with developing your app. For styling, you can apply your knowledge of SCSS to make the app look the way you want.

Challenge: Amid the daily routine, programmers can forget to report their time. We were in search of an easy way to get a daily report so we could notify programmers who forgot to log their time.

Solution: We designed a bot on the Microsoft Bot Framework. Every day at 11:00 pm and 9:00 am, the bot verifies that time reports are complete and notifies employees via direct messages on their corporate Slack accounts in case they aren’t.

Application security isn’t a feature or an advantage but rather an essential and necessary element. A security breach can affect a company financially but even more importantly can wreck its reputation. That’s why app security should be a priority during development.

Our main objective was to build a system that could help us easily monitor the temperature and humidity inside our office building. There were no strong requirements in terms of what the end product should be - an app, a website or some kind of a GUI that could only be used inside the office, so it would be our future task. For the first few months, we focused on the hardware and the firmware.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google technology which allows mobile devices to load web pages in a blink of an eye. It is intended for the whole English-speaking segment of the Internet. You can easily integrate it into your project, provided that you know some of its peculiarities.

The problem of continuous integration is quite particular for iOS, it is particularly sensitive in significant enterprises and is not-so-critical in small outsourcing companies. Of course, there is already a whole bunch of ready-made solutions, the most popular of which is fabric.io, diawi.com, testflight, but there are many others. Consider the basic pros and cons of these three application distribution platforms.

The proposed new EU GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] law extends the scope of the EU data protection regulation to all foreign companies processing data of EU residents. It provides for a harmonization of the data protection regulations throughout the EU, thereby making it easier for non-European companies to comply with these GDPR acts; however, this comes at the cost of a strict data protection compliance regime with severe penalties of up to 4% of worldwide turnover.

Firebase is a web app development platform created by Google. It lets you develop the whole app on the front-end without any server-side code. At the same time, it does let you set up some server-side logic via Firebase Functions if you need to react to certain events (creation of data or files, login, https requests) so you can send emails or push notifications or process the data after it is written.

Can you imagine our life without the internet? Nowadays, by the click of the mouse, you can get any information in a second. It's true, but mostly for the people who can use a mouse, see the screen, listen to an audio file... In this article, I want to share the importance of Web Accessibility for the people with disabilities (WAI). First time I touched this question by the request of our client - American Heart Association and our cooperation gave me deep understanding how people with disabilities use the web, their feelings when they cannot access the web, and what we can do to make sites more accessible.

In 2016 Umbraco company launched the cloud version of their CMS - Umbraco Cloud. The company says that Umbraco as a Service gives us the all-in-one solution: Azure hosting and predictability in the projects, built on 10 years of experience. Umbraco as a Service or UaaS finally came to me, so let's start. Prepare for a start For an easy start Umbraco provides several ways:

1. Step-by-step description and possible problems solving for fans to read manuals from cover-to-cover.

Wow, what a year 2016 was! Brexit, US presidential election, and talks how it will impact on the technology world… I think, we’ll touch this issue later, but now we want to take some local talk: about Ukraine and our hometown - Kharkov. In our last article “Outsourcing to Ukraine”, we already wrote about reasons and benefits of outsourcing to Ukraine. So, let's touch another question: Is it safe to give long term projects to Ukrainian IT Development companies? Let's look:

1. The official data from Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine talk: in 2015-2016 more than 23 millions of foreigners

Outsourcing software development in Ukraine already has a 20-year history. The history starts with the removal of the Iron Curtain and formation of a new independent democratic country. In the legacy of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has obtained a strong scientific base and a huge entrepreneurial potential.

To date, the country operates 350 universities, 45 of which are located in the city of Kharkiv, including the Kharkiv National University, founded in 1805.

Outsourcing is no more about the budget. The choice of outsourcing and outstaffing providers gives businesses an opportunity to launch a win-win professional partnership with effective and transparent management and top-qualified development team.  

Nowadays, a great variety of different CMS are applied by website developers and a very rare website is fully custom developed. The variety of content management systems is so rich that it is almost impossible not to find a CMS, which will be fully along with client's requirements and will save time and money comparing with custom solution development. Moreover, extension of the CMS-based application is much easier and cheaper

Hooray! We proud to announce that we became the Umbraco Registered Partner! Umbraco is our love since 2008. The partnership will help us to always be at the forefront of Umbraco as a business. We expect more projects to be done with Umbraco as a Service. UaaS is the cloud solution based on Microsoft Azure. UaaS will free us from dull and time-consuming tasks such as manual upgrading, painful deployment, and annoying content freeze. Our work with

There is a good tradition in Kharkiv to take part in the international marathon. People from over the Kharkiv region come to anticipate it. It is annual marathon which is brought in Record Book of Ukraine as the most popular race in the number of registered participants. The route where it took place was laid through the central streets of the First capital. Finish and start were situated in the center of our lovely city. Our “UKAD” team also was anticipated in this prominent event. Our developers are keen on a healthy way of living and it were a good chance to demonstrate our abilities! The warm weather encouraged our spirit.

Clients may succeed in communicating with business clients and partners, but when it comes to developing websites or software, they lack the background to explain the details of what they want. If a client allows the developers to take the reins, in most cases the final result may disappoint and not be exactly what the client wants. This way, each interaction is reviewed by the team of developers and the client. The aim is to keep the client     

Nowadays the most modern designers work with Sketch. Because of its ability to draw in the interface interaction and its tiny weight. Being NET developers we use Windows so there is a complication to collaborate with Sketch which was created only for Mac users. But those dark days are away and the clouds begin to dissipate over the world of NET developers. So, meet - Avocode! Avocode is the product created especially for burnt out frontend developers and serves as a bridge between devs and designers.

You can now cast your votes to determine which 5 lucky people win these years much-coveted MVP awards. The community is the best feature of Umbraco and the people who are actively helping other people discovering every nook and cranny of Umbraco are a huge part of our friendly DNA. The MVP awards are the community’s way of thanking the people that we find the most valuable. MVP in the Umbraco world means Most Valuable People

Among some development teams, there is a misconception that the software release is an only about “to deliver the code (the new functionality) to a production server”. In case of such an approach, the release management flow stops right after the code delivery. And a big disadvantage here is about no one is ready to answer the important questions, like

• “what features were delivered to week/month ago”,
• “what features are planned to be released this/next week”,
• “what was the last release structure (how many new features, bug fixing, UI or UX improvements, etc)”.

Agile environment, dozens of new tasks and daily product support activities are taking the situation far and far more out of control.

.NET developers demand to keep highest rates on the global employment market during the past 18 years. Companies worldwide are looking for qualified .NET engineers, as a simple research of job opportunities shows. For example, a google request “.NET developer” gives more than 7,240,000 results.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project from Google and Twitter, allows you to create pages with instant download. These are common web pages that have AMP HTML. Average page load is 0.7 seconds.

Validator.ampproject.org is a convenient and easy-to-use tool with an interface created for the AMP Validator tool. It shows the HTML code of the page that the user is checking and its errors. AMP Validator can be used as an extension in the browser, that is handy. it is available for Chrome and Opera. This extension automatically checks all pages with AMP. To analyse the page, check the indication signs.

Being a software house working both with EPiServer and Umbraco, we got numerous questions from customers about the differences between the two CMS platforms.  If Umbraco free and Episerver is costly, why some clients still choose Episerver? Which platform is better for editors? Which could be the ideal choice for the project?

The article is not supposed to be a detailed comparison of each CMS features. It is a subjective analysis based on our experience.

In UKAD we widely use Azure for the projects. In this article, I want to outline the list of top Azure services we work with.