Author: Jeff Marino

Chauffeur App

In 2008 EmpireCLS needed to revamp their current pager strategy for communicating reservation information and statuses to and from their chauffeurs. We created a Windows Mobile 6 app to be deployed on Moto Q devices.

Once released the chauffeurs had constant real-time updates of reservations data and had the ability, via 1 or 2 taps, to notify dispatch of various statuses that occur when picking up and driving a customer to their destination.

This project required a backend web service implementation to communicate with the mobile device app. The backend web service in turn communicated with several Linux services via windows sockets.

Technologies… Windows Mobile 6, .net framework, WCF, asp.net, IIS

EmpireCLS Customer Website

In 2007, EmpireCLS needed to revamp their customer booking website. This website allowed private customers, corporate customer, and travel administrators to manage reservations. This website also acted as the portal for EmpireCLS’ vast network of affiliates, allowing them to both receive assigned trips and notify EmpireCLS of statuses and closeout information.

One of the biggest challenges of this site was that it had to integrate with the existing Linux system. We designed and implemented a socket communication framework to facilitate this. We use Code Smith to generate the communication layer based upon XML models that we created to specify methods and messages.

Technologies… asp.net web forms, C#, Code Smith, IIS, and Linux

Source Code Control Procedures

In 2007 EmpireCLS’ current Linux 1 million line code base had no source control and no build scripts. The development process was to copy a file and backup into a sub-directory before making changes.

We installed a TFS Linux client and added the entire code base to a TFS project. We then trained the 2 Linux developers on TFS check-in / check-out procedure sand branching scenarios.

Now that the code was source controlled we moved on to creating build scripts for the 120 programs and services that they were constantly updating. These build scripts where then source controlled.

The result of this was the clients code base being controlled, backed-up, and a repeatable build process.

Developer Training

In 2007 Comverse required a bit of help with the training of a junior programmer.

I personally helped one of the junior developers build out a file synchronization tool. This involved daily mentoring sessions, code reviews, and paired programming sessions. This was extremely fulfilling as the developer was really inexperienced and was basically forced to sink or swim on their own. This project went on for a few months and by the end of the time the developer was comfortable with continuing on with the development of this tool on their own.

Comverse Integration

In 2006 Comverse asked us to help with the systems integration of their latest product acquisition.

Comverse had just acquired another company at the time and was trying to integrate their front-end into the existing back-end.

This project consisted of building a J2EE framework. I looked at this as seeing how the other half lived. We were able to pick J2EE up pretty quickly as it had a lot of parallels with the .NET world. My task was to put together patterns and practices for extensibility models for their next-gen product. This included learning swing, spring, java beans, etc.

Our contribution was a proof of concept showing various patterns to use for extensibility.

Real Time Billing Software – Next Gen

In 2005 Comverse asked us to help design and implement the next generation of their product line.

We were tasked with helping the staff figure out how to make their entire existing product line extensible. The goal was to simplify onboarding of new customers that had specific requirements outside of the core framework. The extensible points in the existing product ranged from embedded SQL in C++ projects, web services, GUI clients, Oracle stored procedures and tables, along with various build, package, and deployment processes.

We developed a meta-data model to represent all the extension points and hooks and by running a custom code generation tool we would build all the stubs for the extensibility pieces during a build process.

Various technologies were used here… C++, PL/SQL, VB.NET, HTML, etc.

Real Time Billing Software

In 2005 Comverse asked us to help maintain their current set of real time billing webservices.

To cut our teeth we were tasked with maintenance of the current real-time billing web services backend. We basically just had to fix existing bugs. I believe we were able to start coding and contributing the very first day on site and continued cleaning everything up over a 2 month period.

Since we were in maintenance mode we were not able to create anything new but we were able to stabilize their existing system, provide more code coverage in unit tests, and decrease the overall number of issues they were tracking.

The existing application was vb.net with an Oracle backend. This was our first foray into vb.net having come from a primarily C# background. Was basically the same good ole .NET framework with a different syntax.

Information Management Software

In 2004 Deloitte faced many issues with their existing fat client audit software and decided it was time to implement a more enterprise wide solution to meet the geographically distributed needs of their business. The firm was not able to get information and guidelines to their auditors in a timely manner because it was a manual process. An enterprise system was designed to allow for real-time data exchange to and from the 40K+ auditors throughout the world. The new system would synchronize information between individual auditors with the global servers, as opposed to using CDs for information transfer. The system would now allow managers to view aggregate audit data from several auditors at once via dashboards.

The new system alleviated ongoing application maintenance issues that the firm was facing. Rather than having to distribute thousands of CDs, the auditors in the field were able to connect to the central servers and download the latest application software.

Internationalization requirements were easily met with the new system since all information that required localization were stored in centralized repositories and not hard coded within the client application. The information was able to be exported, translated by 3rd party consultants and the like, and then re-imported back into the system for synchronization with the auditor client applications.

This system required a distributed deployment environment across the globe. Each country, or region within a country, had their own centralized deployment. Each deployment was required to be available 24/7 so Microsoft clustering technologies were utilized to allow for active / active node clusters for the SQL server deployments. Clients connected to their regional application servers via a VPN connection, which then directed them, via a NLB (Network Load Balancer), to the application server farm.

We were also tasked with help bridge the gap between multiple teams both on premises and in Europe. This was one of the more exciting aspects of the project as we were able to build a true camaraderie with the European team where there were some issue previously.

The result of this product was a tool that allowed subject matter experts to author content that would streamline and simplify the audit process, increasing data capture validity, and decrease overall time spent on client engagements.

The application was built using win forms and accessed used a local SQL Server database. Background synchronization was used to bring down the latest content from a centralized SQL Server to the local client. Versioning needed to be taken into consideration so as to not break existing data relationships locally with new data from the server. The application was built using C#, XML, and ado.net for the data access.

Each regional / country deployment supported synchronization of 100K+ rows of data to 1K – 10K client users on a daily basis. Each regional / country deployment supported synchronization to central firm repositories for 1000K+ rows per week.

Auditing Software

In 2003 Deloitte asked us to help revamp the current client auditing software that was used by thousands of auditors in the field to facilitate auditing processes at client facilities in the field. The application was used a mix of document gathering, canned forms, wizards, and contextual guidance to help auditors gather the most relative information.

We were tasked with revamping the existing application, bringing up to date, and making it more of an online / offline experience that that the auditors could both receive the latest procedures and guidelines faster and to allow consolidation of data across multiple team members.

We were able to help guide the development teams technically and to build out some frameworks to be used in building the client application. We were then tasked with splitting off into a separate group to build the information management system.

The client was using the .NET framework (C#), local SQL Server, and .NET office integration.

Order Management Software

In 2002 Barnes & Noble asked us to help design and implement their new order management system. This was in preparation for the upcoming Holiday season and the concern was not being able to keep up with the ordering demands of their internet customers. The single monolithic Unix server couldn’t keep up, couldn’t scale, and was being manually tweaked on a 24 hour basis to keep the business running.

The replacement system would be geographically distributed and would easily scale horizontally, and allow for quick and agile expansion for the future.

We built this system on top of the “Order Fulfillment System” that we had built prior. It tied together multiple geographic deployments of the “Order Fulfillment System”, around 10 or so, with real-time order status synchronization from each fulfillment system.

We were extremely successful with this project and were able to complete on time and meet the holiday demand. This gave B&N breathing room to continue growing out their online presence which increased sales over time and allowed the customer base to grow.

Dozens of services were used to asynchronously process the orders, a poor man’s micro-service architecture. We had a direct feed from the web site via SQL Server 6.5 replication. We used a stored procedure that would put in bound orders into an MSMQ queue that would kick off the various processes. Email, credit cards, inventory allocations, shopping to geographically distributed fulfillment centers etc.

We developed a framework that would allow several developers to work in parallel and to rapidly build and deploy the various VB6 services. The VB6 services were deployed as generic applications on a Wolfpack cluster, Microsoft’s initial implementation of their application clustering service. The VB6 services interacted with MTS, Microsoft’s initial COM+ offering, components and used DTC to integrate the MSMQ and MTS transaction logic.

4 clustered SQL server deployments were used as the central data repository (2 for reporting purposes, 1 for CRM / order management, and 1 for fail-over). The primary CRM / order management cluster synchronizes data with the 2 reporting clusters.

4 clustered application server deployments were used to orchestrate the order processing. MSMQ was used to manage the workflow via a proprietary ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). The order processing workflow was broken down into several synchronous / asynchronous sub-processes which were then each distributed across several queues to sustain the throughput. The system was extremely scalable in the fact that if any sub-process required more processing or if there were a larger than normal influx of orders for the Christmas season, more queues could be added for the sub-process. When an application server reached its maximum throughput, a new application server could be added with its own set of processing queues, and the existing load could then be split.

Upon completion of this project we were seeing the following transaction statistics

  • 150K+ order confirmation e-mails per day
  • 500K+ item sourcing and inventory allocation transactions per day
  • 1000K+ item / order status change transactions per day
  • 10000K+ OLTP to OLAP synchronization transactions per day
  • 100K+ CRM transactions per day
  • 10000K+ inventory update transactions per day