Visual WebGui Case Studies

"Development assumed productivity would be equal to the speed of developing WinForms applications, and this proved to be a correct assumption… the application performs very well and… has exceeded expectations," Mike Bennett.

Overview
Digital Partners is a global network of independent IT Architects, Analysts, Senior Software Developers & Accountants, who deliver quality solutions to a wide variety of business sectors. This particular client is a company that reverse engineers semiconductor components and then undertakes detailed technical analysis of these components on behalf of large global semiconductor & electronics manufacturers. The primary output of this company are detailed high-value reports which often are used in patent litigation cases.

Business needs
Due to pressures in their busy DTP studio, the client desired to automate and control the submission of requests for DTP services with the end result being a measurable and improved service delivery.

In order to achieve this, a means to electronically manage the submission of DTP requests across the organization was needed. The envisaged solution would also provide email notification mechanisms to keep the DTP department and their internal customers up to date with the progress of jobs.

It was also very important that the solution would be SharePoint compatible so it can be accessed via the company’s SP portal. In addition to SharePoint, the system needed to integrate into the company’s financial system (Great Plains) to retrieve financial information on the DTP request. A full Active Directory integration was needed as well as the ability to work with the current database which was based on SQL 2005.

In addition, it was a key requirement that any application developed would need to achieve sub-second response times, be compatible with mainstream browsers and have rich AJAX-like functionality.

The Solution
The team selected Visual WebGui for that product after it successfully completed several previous projects with Visual WebGui. Therefore, they knew that Visual WebGui would fit this project due to its speed of development and ease of deployment.  Key points include:

• Previous success with VWG
• Speed of Development
• Browser based
• Easy integration with Active Directory
• Easy to deploy 

"Current releases of Visual WebGui have proven to be very stable, so the development of this web based application encountered no serious technical issues from the tool," stated Mike Bennett of Digital Partners and continued that "The integration of VWG into the Visual Studio development environment is practically seamless; quite unusual for a tool like this given the unique and far reaching capabilities of this tool."

Since the Visual WebGui toolset is almost identical in use and behavior as their Windows Forms counterparts experienced WinForms programmers adapted almost instantly to the Visual WebGui toolset. "Development assumed productivity would be equal to the speed of developing WinForms applications, and this proved to be a correct assumption," noted Mike Bennett about the development process and also added that "deployment cannot be simpler. For this project it was simply a case of publishing the project to web folder using Visual Studio."

Benefits
Final performance statistics show the application performs very well and the application has exceeded expectations. What was once a ‘whiteboard’ process has now become an integrated, measurable and robust application used by many key members of the organization. Some of the business benefits realized includes:

• Very little time is needed to learn and operate the application
• Communication problems between the DTP department and internal users have been eliminated
• Both user and DTP errors have been significantly reduced
• Assignment of DTP staff to jobs is being managed more efficiently
• Throughput and performance for this department can now being measured by management
• Reports to clients are being delivered on-time

Screenshots
Active Directory Login
 

The user enters their AD userId and password to access the application. The entire application has been written using one logical tab control.
 
Open jobs in the Finance System (Great Plains)
 

Note that all sensitive information has been grayed out. When the user is logged in all open jobs (jobs in progress) are listed in a VWG listbox. Alongside these jobs, if there is already a DTP job in progress, DTP information is show. The user can ‘double-click’ a row to create a new DTP request, or view the DTP job by just clicking the row. Alternatively, the user can click the “DTP Jobs” tab to have a focused view shown of just the DTP jobs.

Search Button
 

Clicking the search button pop-up’s a modal search box that allows the user to search for a particular Finance system job.
 
DTP Jobs View
 

This view shows the DTP jobs in the system, the status of the job, who the requester was and who in the studio is working on the job. The above listview control used supports column sorting and automatic paging.  Note that all sensitive information has been grayed out. 

DTP Job Detail 

This screen displays the detail of a DTP work order. Note that all sensitive information has been grayed out. 

When the DTP request is created the user fills in the job details and links the work order to Finance job.  Additional attributes are included where available.   When the request the user clicks the “Submit Work Order” button and this locks the request to the user and sends an auto-email advising the DTP manager a new request has been submitted and a resource needs to be assigned to the job.

At this point DTP takes over the ownership of the request and will assign a resource to the work order who will update the work order as the job progresses through publishing. Comments and notes are provided to keep track of aspects, problems and progress of the job. Ultimately, the job will be shipped to the customer and the work status changed to “Final Shipped” thereby closing the work order.