Puttin On The Ritz

The Mid-Western User Group meeting was held on Thursday with folks coming in from as far away as Indiana and Illinois.  It was, as usual, a family reunion atmosphere with familiar faces and warm greetings.  What strikes me about the content, looking back at it, is the amount of information exposure possiblities.  MITS 2nd go-round on its report writer looks well done.  The NovoRoiSystems real-time SQL data warehouse continues to wow.  Now with more in-bound interfacing it is starting to grow into something much more significant than just an on-ramp to MS Reporting Services.  I spent some time on the growing ATOM/RSS news feed capabilities.

The most fun, for me, was showing off the 7.3 web UI improvements with Last Keys, Most Recently Used stacks and AutoFill.  We broke the seamingly endless barage of technical detail with YouTube clips from the "Puttin On The Ritz" Gene Wilder/Peter Boyle song and dance number in "Young Frankenstein".  Don't know that I could sing and dance on the same stage as Gene Wilder, but I feel pretty confident about being able to croon along with the monster!

After a memorial day break I'll be heading back into the 15 portal projects.  I am adding a news reader panel that can display a configurable Manage 2000 news feed, and converting them from XSLT generated forms to WebControls so that they can be controlled through the PageViewFilter system. Fun, fun, fun....

Last Keys and Other UI Friendliness

The last keys project is winding down.  I just checked in the latest round of javascript upgrade for the m2kInputData function which includes a Most-Recently-Used stack on the up/down arrows, automatic display of validation name or description, and Auto-Fill from the MRU stack.  Yes scope creep is a problem, but they were low hanging fruit once the \LK infrastructure was developed. It would be wasteful not to gather them in while I was harvesting.

There are still a few more i's to dot and t's to cross, but it is starting to feel pretty impressive when you type along on the devweb and get the sort of experience you are only used to from PWS.

Next up will be some refactoring to reduce the startup time from PWS.

Last Keys Part I

The Last Keys project is well under way.  I've just completed the conversion on the UniBasic side that will allow participation from the web side to work.  Last Friday I got far enough to run a few timings from an HttpHandler through from the web site and am getting last keys values in less than 1/30 of a second. So performance-wise the current design is proving out well.  Lots of work awaits in the roiTextbox and javascript libraries. Switching from heavy Unibasic work back to .NET seems alot like getting ones sea legs.  Takes a couple of days before I can code straight, or perhaps at the correct Microsoft pitched angles.

A major part of the speed I am seeing is from tools improvements that Doug and I were able to put into the CallRPCSub routine which shepards all the calls coming in across RedBack.  We've been able to shave .1 to .4 seconds off of each RPC call.  This has been patched back to 7.1 and 7.2 so 7.1sp7 and 7.2sp4 should show significant speed improvements for all the web functions. 

Release 7.3 Project Progress

Despite broken ankles and bouts of pneumonia Doug and I finally have the Manage 2000 web functions building under VS2008.  There remains a little tweaking to do on the installations routines.  But at last I feel like I can concentrate on new feature development.

I have started down the development list and finished my first significant web tools enhancement for 7.3, the integration of ECA's and the news feed system.  ECA's provide rich html scripting from all sorts of system events.  News feeds provide standard pluggable integration to Sharepoint and other web platforms.  Putting the two together really extends  the news source capabilities to 'broadcast' all sorts of automated news articles as the ERP systems churns through its machinations. 

Next up is Last Key integration between PWS sessions and web functions.  This will, in all likely hood, be the largest project I undertake for the 7.3 release (not counting the VS2008 ASP.NET 3.5 infrastructure upgrade).

I am still in the early stages of design, but have identified a whole raft of issues that were not obvious to me during my initial rough cut do-ability considerations.  I didn't realize how much of the fun part of working on Manage 2000 are these design conundrums that must be puzzled and teased out.

Visual Studio 2008 and Manage 2000 Web Functions

Mark your calendar 13:58 on December 12, 2008 the development staff completed the last of the 295 ASP.NET web projects, thus heaving the Manage 2000 7.3 web footprint on top Microsoft's not-so-backwardly-compatible Visual Studio 2008 designer.

This is an important achievement in terms of product life expectancy as it puts the Manage 2000 web presence on supported Microsoft technology for at least the next 5 years.

Hopefully, next time they will be a little kinder and gentler with backward compatibility.

This is not the end of development for the 7.3 release. It is not even the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning,to paraphrase Carnahan  paraphrasing Churchill.

Next up is build and install capability so that as developers add and enhance application functionality we can easily re-install development sites and do integration testing.

Then the real fun begins putting to good use all of the fantastic enhancements in ASP.NET 3.5 and Infragistics 2008 to make Manage 2000 7.3 web functions sizzle.

7.2 Release and Looking Ahead

Entry for February 11, 2007

After 10 days of negatives temps, some days with -5 for a high, I am ready to be out of the deep freeze. Past -10 my car sleeps with a trouble light under the hood to make sure I can get the kids to school in the morning. Maybe time to add that block heater.

The 7.2 release is currently in Beta. Lots of positive feedback, as well as, bug reports and clean-up work.

We are currently conducting training presentations to helpline, custom code and consultants. Last week I covered PageViewFilters and other tools enhancements, as well as, the new web ProductConfigurator interperter for implementing CTO on the web.

I continue to scout out the direction ahead with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0. The way looks rough but passable at the moment, though where we all end up is sure to be filled with complaints. There are some tools I can write to smooth the way, but there are significant short-comings in the VS2005 IDE. The VS team seems to have fixated on codeless access to SQL and forsaken all other paths. Everything is focused on stateless, first-normal data updates between flat UI components and the SQL database, or some other object which must be organized along the same CRUD lines in a first normal world. They do not appear to have made any accomodation for web base applications with rich hierarchical complex UI's. Apparently we are supposed to use winforms unless we are implementing an Amazon.com web site. There are web sites and then there are web applications. Microsoft appears to be pressuring the web application camp back to winforms.

In particular databinding UI from hierarchical datasets to webcontrols is just plain gone. They have drastically different models for winform data access as compared to web forms. They are pushing ObjectDataSource and SqlDataSource as codeless access to databases and great productivity enhancements. But these depend on new TableAdapters within the dataset to orchestrate flat table accesses back and forth to the DB. They are tightly coupling the UI to the DB.

For thoses of us with ACID processes based on hierarchical datasets there is no room to fit in. The idea that first normal database requirements are going to start driving UI design is just plain scary. It may be ultra productive for the person creating it, but it's going to be butt ugly for the poor soul who has to actually use such software.

On another front I am watching Orcas with amusement. They are so hyped about LINQ and the ability to hook up SQL query statements to gridview. Manage 2000 has been delivering web query capability for over 5 years which include embedded sub-tables and hyperlinking. Our queries can even be defined from a report generator UI. I predict that when LINQ gets to field everyone will discover there is still a lot of problems because they will often want a three dimensional query result and you can't get that from a first-normal database without a lot of effort.

The reign of quality fights for a hierarchical object oriented UI. The reign of quantity fights for simple flat table models. Who will win?

ERPBusinessObjectService - M2k SOA

Entry for October 09, 2006

Manage 2000 7.2 sp0 is "in the can". Most of the preparations for Perspectives have been finished. And now the development team is settling into a pleasant lull after the long hard summer. There remain the perennial small projects to occupy us until the beta sites start feeding us the work which will make 7.2 "sea-worthy".

I am happy with amount of "cool stuff" which made it into 7.2. And yet, in each major project, I can see another level to climb up to.

The ERPBusinessObjectService, in particular, has some very important new features. Unfortunately there is no session planned for it as Perspectives. But maybe I can sneak in some attention to it.

There is the beginnings of legitmate interest in web services among clients, and 7.2 ERPBusinessObjectService provides new useful methods:

* ValidateRecordKey - for validating parts and customers without having to export and refresh Manage 2000 file contents to SQL tables
* CallUdtSub - for running UniBasic subroutines across SOAP. A Unibasic programmer can write a routine and a web developer can instantly make use of it.
* UniQuerySelect, GetKeysFromCookie, and GetItemsAsXML provide the foundation for running UniQuery processes returning XML content.