To Dev or not to Dev

At the end of November 2006 I was approached by the company I was working for to sit in on a technical meeting they were having with some developers from one of the other branches. The meeting was regarding an Asset Management system that was commissioned around 2 years ago by a big corporate company in the motoring industry. During the meeting various flaws in the current development was exposed and after a few hours of discussion, the original development team decided to pack their bags and walk out of the meeting.

After looking at the source code and reviewing the functional specification I agreed to assist in the redesign and redevelopment of the project. During this process I learnt a considerable amount regarding the languages I am using and some important features of the .Net Framework and C#.

The project required the following results:

1. .Net Windows Service to manage all database interaction using .Net Remoting.
2. .Net Windows Application to manage a PDT (Windows Mobile Device)
3. .Net Windows Application to interface with the Remote Server
4. .Net Mobile Application to allow the scanning of assets using Bluetooth and Scanners

Over the next few posts I am hoping to write some helpful and informative articles regarding the different features implemented in the project and some of the lessons that were learnt. This began my adventure in completing the above system in under 3 weeks and still following the complete project cycle. Hopefully what I learnt will help be able to assist other developers in some way.