VS2010 opens designer door for GreatSoft
André Coetzee’s company, GreatSoft, has been making use of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010) to develop integrated practice management solutions that automate key administrative tasks.
“GreatSoft is an independent software vendor (ISV) that specialises in practice management solutions for time-based professionals, such as accountants, auditors and consulting engineers.”
Coetzee says the company provides a module called e-Docs, which automates the generation and distribution of debtor statements and invoices using email or print media. ”The modules can also prepare data for upload to bill consolidation and payment services.”
“When we were looking to upgrade our existing e-Docs application to a new platform, we had to come up with a design that allows our consultants and clients to easily configure documents, layouts and business rules in a way that does not require coding skills or an in-depth knowledge of technologies such as HTML or CSS.”
He says GreatSoft looked to the .NET 4 client profile, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) / Silverlight XAML Flow Documents, the new controls that come with VS2010, data bindings components and graphics and animation enhancements from WPF.
The WPF designer surface is now a part of VS2010, and the enhancements made over the earlier version of the integrated development environment (IDE) versions allows us to get the designs right quickly and with very little effort.”
He says the auto-implemented properties are a great addition to the IDE. “It enables us to quickly specify the a property of a class without having to write code to Get or Set the property. The Visual Basic compiler automatically creates a private field to store the property variable in addition to creating the associated Get and Set procedures.
The implicit line continuation in VB.NET has to be mentioned, since this now rules out the need for the underscore character between new lines while adding code.”
He says one of the focus points with the new generation e-Docs was to enhance the user experience so far as designing and configuring document layouts. “Here we have employed the power an ease of using XAML Flow Documents to allow formatting of document and report layouts.”
According to Coetzee, the addition of controls such as the DataGrid and enhancements to the data binding and element binding made it easier to present data to the end-user. “It also made it easier to implement business rules for security, and include roles based functionality.”
Even though the new generation of e-Docs is a WPF rich client, it does not require the full power of the .NET Framework 4. The .NET 4 client profile framework helps us to deploy a rich client application that has a small footprint.”
We have just released a pilot at one of our chartered accountant clients and expect to ship the product to the rest of our e-Docs population and new adopters within two months,” he concludes.
Article From ITWEB By James Lawson, 17 Jun 2010
