It's been quite a while since I sat down and wrote in the blog! Since early December I have been absolutely buried in work for a client, but I'm finally getting to the end of it. Should finish up with it this week and be able to re-group and see what's next on the agenda.
I wrote software for this client which they have been using for the past 5-6 years and they are now starting to lease it out to other companies in the same field. So we had to do some polishing on the program, make sure everything was compatible with Vista and Windows 7. Installers were improved and all binaries code signed. We also upgraded the application from SQL Anywhere 9.0.2 to 11.0.1.
This software was originally written by Sue between 1996 and 2000 using TPS files and ClaCom for transmitting data from remote users. When I started working on the SQL version of this software back in 2002 we decided to use Crystal Reports, but we found out later that it was next to impossible to deploy it, but it wasn't a big deal since they just bought the Standard Edition of Crystal Reports for the computers so it was not a big deal. Now it seems that it is impossible to get the Standard Edition so I set out to try to come up with a better solution and see if I could figure out how to deploy this. After some snooping around I found out that Crystal Reports Xi came with deploy-able merge modules and after some more research I found out that I could use Visual Studio 2010 to create an MSI installer with the merge modules. Testing showed that it worked perfectly so we deployed this new MSI installer. It adds about 40MB to the install, but everyone using this is on high speed internet connection so downloading 65MB install is not a problem.
We converted the new company to use the software two weeks ago and everything went smoothly except they had to use some old hardware for the database server as their new server had been delayed - once delivered last week it turned out to be defective so this is taking some extra time. There have been some minor issues that have come up, nothing major, but we have had to make some modifications to the program and the database after we deployed because this company operates a bit differently than my client's company. Dealing with outdated hardware has prompted us to decide that when we do this again we will buy a computer to set this up on and get it completely set up before we deliver it so that everything is working perfectly when we hand it over. This doesn't deal with a lot of data (accumulated total number of all records in all tables for both companies is < 100,000) As I mentioned, the software uses SQL Anywhere 11.0.1 and we use the Sybase Replication (dbremote) to transmit data from remote computers to a consolidated database via FTP server. The remote users are brokers that work remotely, transmitting trade orders to the back office where they are processed. We have been using Sybase replication since 2005 without a single problem, it just works, so this has worked perfectly for our application. I need to finish off a report and do an update for the new company and then I should be mostly done with this client for now, apart from regular maintenance:) I have several outstanding issues that I need to deal with in the tools from PowerOffice as well as new updates for Utilities and Build Automator. I will be starting to work on those again next week and hopefully I can get back on schedule with my products by the beginning of February. I appreciate the patience whle I have been going through an extremely busy period for the past 4-6 weeks! Arnor Baldvinsson
