Scheduler is locked?

Lately, lot of people talk about RPA but very few people talk about what happens when you have to scale and you have something like 20 robot working all together, synchronized, with a "time/resource filling" target. Sometimes you could see the scheduled tasks forever "Pending", not responding to any delete or run requests. The solution is: let's go...

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Make your life a little easier with ODBC

I've written about the DLL import problem of BluePrism, of possible workaround with custom DLLs, but we can also make our life easier when we can. For example in my last project i had to work with a lot of data sources as SQL Server, MySQL and Access all together. All those...

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Import-SPWeb preserves ListItemId?

If you're reading this you have my same problem, you don't have an answers to this question, and maybe you need to move a list across site across site collections/web applications/farms without changing the list item id. Someone says yes, others say no. The answer is that both...

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BluePrism: drill down about housekeeping BP DB

As you already know, it's so easy to finish space on a DB server when you use BP. The reason could be, a poor design of logging (e.g log everything) or maybe logging in a loop. It's clear that you don't need to log everything, but only what you have effectively to justify if...

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A Blue Prism project with custom DLLs: load DLL from everywhere

I admit, this is one of the most painful points when i work with Blue Prism. As explained in other posts about DLLs, we have to put class libraries into the root folder of Blue Prism in order to use classes. This could be a problem when you don't have the rights to access Blue...

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Why in the world i cannot get deferred item?

I was wondering why i could not get deferred items from a queue, so i drilled down just a little bit the BP Database in order to see all deferred items Just watching the queue So i dumped data before and after completion of the object just to understand how the DB row is...

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The KeepAlive problem

Sometimes, you just cannot ask to the IT department to disable screensaver or user lock screen, and personally i never understood why if we are dealing with virtualized machines, so you have to solve the problem somehow. You can rely for sure on the LoginAgent VBO, which helps you to understand if the screen is locked and so you can login again, but...

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Use BP Tags to do something more

What about tags? I think tags can be used  to do more than simply tag an item to understand what kind of item the robot is working on. Indeed we thank about a new way to use it, just replicating the .NET Dictionary ToString(). You can represent a dictionary as a set of...

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Scheduling processes and unregistered named pipe

Surprise surprise, a customer asked to start a robot at 7:00 AM, but if you generally work from 9AM to 9 PM like me, you'll find that start a robot at 7:00AM is... how can i say... not so beautiful. So It's time to make the scheduler to work! Let's assume the Resource PC we...

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Just another out-of-date but maybe useful trick with KnockoutJS

I know what you're thinking about: another post on KnockoutJS? Again? To be extremely clear, i 've written this post a lot of months ago but i never completed and published, and really i could not just delete it. So today i will show you just a little example of comunicating widgets: it's not something complicated, but i think it can be also reproduced...

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Another HOWTO about media center on Raspberry pi3 (Part 2/2)

I promised this article would be just a little bit more interesting, indeed i will share the bash scripts i did to manage some activities. sendip.sh I've created a simple script which send me an email when the IP changes, or it send me the IP by default at midnight. At first i subscribed to a service called smtp2go, installed ssmtp and configured...

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Another HOWTO about media center on Raspberry pi3 (Part 1/2)

Hi guys, it's a long time i don't touch my raspberry pi 2 media server (from now LittleBox). So with the raspberry pi3 release, i decided to do a little upgrade and creating the new LittleBox. which is the same as the old one, but with pi3, so more powerful. Because of i have...

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Update Content Type in sandbox solution: a forgotten beauty

Like i said in previuos blog posts, i'm using a lot BP with SP on premise or O365, in order to implement a centralized approach to attended RPA. As we already know, nowaday the most used approach is to use PnP scripts and this is something i really like, but i also have to deal...

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A Blue Prism project with custom DLLs: 4 dummies

It seems this blog post was found really interesting from lot of you, but i also read a lot of comments about how can you set up a project and use DLL with BP, so i will show you a practical and really simple example. Here below the code of the DLL i will use, just two classes: Log...

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How Excel VBO in 5.0.33 destroyed my weekend (again locale issue)

Some weeks ago I’ve discovered that even if BP was updated on customer environment, business objects were not. So I decided do update the Excel VBO at the last version: 5.0.33 and I started to see something strange. When I tried to set a formula in an excel cell the formula...

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Playing with RDP and Surface Automation

This is a small blog post about a little trick very useful when you are in supervised-run phase. Typically in this phase, you run the process in debug mode at full speed on a particular machine in order to discover weak points of the automation and performance issues. If the automation is design to use surface automation techniques, desktop resolution...

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Namespace collisions in BluePrism

This will be one of the shortest both on my blog and is about a short and sad story about code refactoring. I was trying to reorder business objects introducing namespaces, as you already know BP encourage to create more than just one business object per application: the problem...

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An approach to exception handling in BluePrism

One of the things I dislike the most is the fact that when someone approaches RPA is lead to think that he/she doesn’t need any, programming language knowledge: sadly it’s not true. The proof of that is the poor exception handling I often see: we know from traditional programming...

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