I've been meaning to write down something on this for a couple weeks now but have been having a tough time formulating a nice message on this. The short version is be very carefull doing this. I believe that somehow AppDomain's rely on something out of the Windows User Profile, and over time in a Windows Service when you're loading and unloading AppDomain's stuff MAY get screwed up.

We had a scheduler app which basically used AppDomain's as an isolation mechanism for controlling when and how each scheduled component was called and then disposed. Code looked something like this...

for each s as ScheduledComponent in myList
Dim d as new AppDomain
try
dim i as IExecutableInstance = d.CreateInstance("LaunchPad")
i.Execute
finally
AppDomain.Unload(d)
end try
next

Over time we'd eventually get into a state where the entire scheduler service which just cause a windows segmentation fault and shut down. No nice dot net exception or anything. Like I said, our best guess is that something gets out of sync between the windows profile and whatever exists in a dot net AppDomain.

Anyway, our solution was to create a wrapper layer which basically called each scheduled component as a process instead. This seems to be working very reliably ever since.

We were having some problems on our development machines at work as soon as we upgraded to Windows 7 and IE8. The problem first manifested itself as a javascript "client out of memory" error while using Outlook Web Access (OWA) but it seemed like randomly we'd have javascript errors while navigating webpages.

Our workaround was to switch over to Google Chrome but then you start finding all the things that don't work with that so we just wanted to get this figured out.

We ended up working microsoft support on this one and long story short, it looks like one of our development tools is overwriting one of the IE classes. They had us re-register a couple classes and now it's working awesome. Here's the registery changes required...

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{79EAC9C5-BAF9-11CE-8C82-00AA004BA90B}]
@="IHlinkFrame"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{79EAC9C5-BAF9-11CE-8C82-00AA004BA90B}\NumMethods]
@="8"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{79EAC9C5-BAF9-11CE-8C82-00AA004BA90B}\ProxyStubClsid32]
@="{A4A1A128-768F-41E0-BF75-E4FDDD701CBA}"

We've had some problems with the Binding Source component in our Windows Forms development and I wanted to jot down a note on here in case anyone else comes across this.

The problem we were having was an IDE runtime error which looks like a NullReferenceException, the specific message says "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".

Apparently this has something to do with the .datasource files that are auto-generated by visual studio for holding "default" values. You can remove these from the My Project folder and then the error goes away. Not sure why these are even required since you can still build without them.

We’ve been fighting an intermittent error with our report viewer for the last couple years that’s been just terrible to track down and I think we finally made some progress today. We use a reporting tool called Data Dynamics Active Reports to generate our Screen and Paper reports. Their tool is basically a set of Dot Net assemblies that allow you to design and code a component called an Active Report.

At runtime, you execute this Active Report and then pass it into another component called an Active Report Viewer for displaying to the user. We found occasionally our users would get stuck in an infinite loop of error messages while displaying a report. Exceptions would pop up looking like this…

(IndexOutOfRangeException) Index was outside the bounds of the array.

   at DataDynamics.ActiveReports.Viewer.-0011.-3cbd()

   at DataDynamics.ActiveReports.Viewer.-dabf.-31a1()

   at DataDynamics.ActiveReports.Viewer.-b212.-afcd()

We could never recreate this on demand, but probably five times a month we would get a hundred error messages coming in from a client site like this. Eventually the client would give up pressing “OK” on our error handler, and kill the process.

When we’ve tried to troubleshoot this in the past it’s been extremely difficult because Data Dynamics obfuscates their code so it can’t be decompiled. Obfuscation basically takes design-time code, and mixes it up so that it’s unreadable, hence the funky function names above. Unfortunately this gives you no sense of what’s actually happening in their app.

A little bit of digging on their support forums today did find a link to a similar issue by another user - http://www.datadynamics.com/forums/85506/ShowPost.aspx

Basically what they’d found was that in a Terminal Services environment, their users would click their “Print” button multiple times – the old adage, keep pressing the button until something happens. What this causes in some instances is for the second “click” to get handled by the newly created Active Report Viewer, even though it’s just in the process of being displayed. Now, if the Viewer is in a funny spot, it can try and interact with this click event while loading the document – that’s what seems to cause the issue.

Once we had a sense of what was causing the issue, it’s pretty simple to disable the ReportViewer until the report has generated its first page and sure enough this causes the issue to go away.

One area of concern that I come up against quite often is the issue of source code version control. At its most basic layer this is nothing more than being able to control what a version of your software consists of... version A versus version B, that sort of thing. This model works great and is well documented on smaller isolated applications but tends to blur a little when working with larger systems. Specifically we’ve had issues managing system dependencies, as well as change requirements on a larger application consisting of about roughly 50 assemblies. I’ll spend just a few minutes here putting pen to paper on how we’ve structured our development tree to accommodate this.

We’ll start at a pretty simple level; each major release is placed in a named folder based on the version name. Our first branch within that folder is named Major.Minor.Zero, Major and Minor are related to the version name while the Zero indicated this is the opening development branch. Here’s how that looks when we start a new major release... our friendly version name is Jupiler and the Major.Minor associated with this is 5.1.

Notice that within the 5.1.0 folder we have a number of sub-folders. These are what we call modules and basically relate to a VS.Net solution; each one consists of roughly 5-6 projects and can be thought of as a sub-system. These sub-systems collaborate to provide our applications functionality.

Now, when we release our major version, Jupiler, we’ll typically LOCK the 5.1.0 folder so that no further changes can be made. This code is set in stone and we want to force all new changes to be done in an isolated environment until they’re tested and ready to go. Invariable though, something critical comes up during rollout and we need to make code changes to address those concerns. When this situation arises we BRANCH into a new folder called Major.Minor.One. This code folder consists of all the new development changes required to add what we call a Service Pack to the release. Here’s how this looks.  

One interesting aspect of this layout is that we only branch the modules that require changes. These Service Pack’s generally don’t require a lot of wholesale change; they`re usually small isolated bugs/features which can be addressed in a single module. You can see in the above diagram that our 5.1.1 only has changes for Accounting, all the other modules are identical to how they were developed in 5.1.0. This gives us a few key benefits.

1.       It limits the amount of open source code.

2.       It makes it easier to identify what code is actively being changed for a service pack.

3.       It leaves the original branch open so that it can be reviewed/modified for OTHER unanticipated issues.

Final rollout of the new changes is done by releasing 5.1.1 of Accounting with all the previous versions of the other modules.

Not that this is necessarily a good idea. But after way too much time googling this, I think I'll clear up the fact that it IS possible call the Microsoft RDP client with a username and password parameter.

Now, everyone out there will say, yeah - we know that. You key in the username and password and if you check off the "remember credentials" checkbox it will store that data.

Well the trick is that this data is stored in a place that's not easily accessed -Windows Stored UserNames and Passwords. This area is basically a secured area of windows where passwords are stored for remote connections. You can access this by going Control Panel\User Accounts\Manager your network passwords. Here's a screen snap.

Our management infrastructure tracks this username and password in a seperate secured database, and then when we call MSTSC.exe from our software we want to pass this information. Now, a little more information on how you can pass parameters to MSTSC is in order. When you call MSTSC you can pass as a parameter a .RDP file which contains information about how you want to connect to the remote computer. Same idea as every other document type in Windows, a .RDP file is associated with MSTSC and is used to contain information for that application. Fortunately the .RDP files are basically key value pairs. Check it out...

screen mode id:i:1
desktopwidth:i:1024
desktopheight:i:768
session bpp:i:16
winposstr:s:0,1,526,61,1566,865
full address:s:SomeIpAddress
compression:i:1
keyboardhook:i:2
audiomode:i:0
redirectdrives:i:0
redirectprinters:i:1
redirectcomports:i:0
redirectsmartcards:i:1
displayconnectionbar:i:0
autoreconnection enabled:i:1
alternate shell:s:
shell working directory:s:
disable wallpaper:i:0
disable full window drag:i:1
disable menu anims:i:1
disable themes:i:0
disable cursor setting:i:0
bitmapcachepersistenable:i:1
allow desktop composition:i:1
allow font smoothing:i:0
redirectclipboard:i:1
redirectposdevices:i:0
authentication level:i:2
prompt for credentials:i:0
negotiate security layer:i:1
remoteapplicationmode:i:0
gatewayhostname:s:
gatewayusagemethod:i:4
gatewaycredentialssource:i:4
gatewayprofileusagemethod:i:0
promptcredentialonce:i:1
drivestoredirect:s:

The imporant pieces here is the "full address" line... this points to the server we're connecting to.

Well... it turns out you can also pass parameters for domain, username, and password. You just need to add them to the bottom of your .rdp file like this

domain:s:MyDomain
username:s:MyUserName
password 51:b:MyPassword

But wait a second, saving a password in plain text in a .rdp file sounds like just about the worst security hole you could use! And you're right - you can't actually pass the password parameter as straight text. It needs to be encrypted binary.

(As an aside, that's what the second part of these key/value pairs is... the s, or b, or i character. That indicates whether the data is String, Binary or Integer).

Well it turns out that taking a straight text password and encrypting it ain't too bad. I'm not going to take credit for this code but the following vb dot net code uses the windows api to do just that.

When passing datasets around via webservices we've had some problems with the size of the resulting xml. The following code will compress the dataset and turn it into a byte(). Note that you need to close the streams after calling WriteXml otherwise you'll get a "unexpected end of file" style exception when you try to load back into your dataset.

Dim results As New DataSet
Dim ms As New IO.MemoryStream(_Args.Results)
Dim cs As New IO.Compression.GZipStream(ms, IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Decompress, False)
results.ReadXml(cs)
cs.Close()
ms.Close()

We have a huge bank of legacy code written in vb6 that we're slowly porting over to dot net. One of these components that's getting shuffled over this week is our Invoice Printing functionality.

Previously this logic was written in Data Dynamics Active Reports 1.0 (COM based) and we're looking to upgrade this to Active Reports 4.2 (Dot Net 2.0). A quick plug, Active Reports is an absolutely awesome tool for designing and developing business reports. Even their COM-based 1.0 model shows a ton of insight into HOW we should be developing reporting applications.

Anyway, we're going to have to re-write some code as part of this process but the one component that would be nice to pull across is the "design" surface. This basically consists of all the controls and layouts. If we have to re-design this from scratch we're going to miss positions, fonts, etc so it's better to automate this piece if we can. Here's what it looks like...

Now, Active Reports supports a common design layout for AR2.0 to AR4.2, sort of a XML-based layout language they call RPX. If you can save a report layout into an RPX you can load it back later on. Trick is that our reports are AR1.0 and that old version uses a different binary format for saving layouts. I need to somehow upgrade these from AR1.0 to AR2.0 before I can save them into the common format.

Turns out this is easier than you'd think. The vb6 report design files are seperated into two components... a binary .DSX file and a text .DSR file. If you crack open the DSR file the first bit of "code" specifies which tool "manages" the resource. That's what the big ugly guid is. By changing this guid from AR1.0 to AR2.0 we can fake VB6 into thinking it's dealing with an AR2.0 report.

Now, when we open up the designer in vb6, we have the option to save the report layout by using the File, Save feature within the report designer. Likewise in dot net we can use the Report menu item to Load a saved layout. We've managed to save ourselves all the work in positioning, sizing, and configuring all the controls behind this active report!

Now, all this effort to avoid recreating some controls... worth it? To me it is. The problem with me redesiging these reports is that...

1. I'm not that great of a detail guy. Not bad, but not great. I'm positive I'd screw something up. And it may not be a huge deal to the first 20 stores that get this upgrade but at some point that change in field size would be a critical concern to some store. If I can avoid the issue altogether that's a good thing.

2. I get bored easy. I'd copy probably 5 controls before I'd get distracted and switched over to something else. I'll bet you it would take me a week to get this one report copied over. By converting the entire report in one pass I've moved the project to the point where I can have someone else take over the loading of data.

We just added a cool new feature to our aristo framework, embedded instant messaging! Pretty typical feature but here's what our gui looks like.

Now when we first heard requests for this component I was a little skeptical. It's pretty much a given that at some point ALL software applications get a request to add an instant messenger and email capability; you could be programming a calculator and eventually you'll get this request. Our I.M. does have a couple key differences.

   1. This is an internal only application. Staff can't be chatting to their friends and family through this messenger.

   2. This is an automatic application. Users don't have to start another app to get the messenger going. It's always on when they're in PBS.

   3. This is an embedded component.  Because we're running in a Terminal window we have to work whithin our existing UI space (aka the terminal window, no extra desktop apps allowed).

   4. Because we're embedded there are some very cool extensions we can add for sending "information" in our software between users. More on this in the next couple weeks.

Here's a quick primer on how this works.

Users now have a messenger icon in their system tray whenever they start Aristo. At login this icon will notify users that they are connected to the aristo messenger (this notification will also point out the fact that there is something new in their software).

Users can right click on this icon to either send a message to a specific user or send a broadcast message. Message windows are pretty much like any other I.M. solution and can be minimized while users are doing actual work. New messages cause the conversation windows to highlight until the user views them.

The more interesting aspect of this component will be HOW we can use it as a tool within our software but we've definitely heard this request a lot and our users should be happy to see we've reacted.

I came across the need to do some t-sql work prior to our annual dealer conference next week. The short version is that we need to sanitize our customer data by replacing customer pictures with some stock photos of people around PBS. I certainly didn't want to have to manually change every customer record so I figured a gigantic t-sql script to update everyone would be a huge help.

Now I gotta admit - this is not the kind of component I normally work on.  Database administrators tear through these kinds of apps but when you're a bit more of a generalist you need to be pretty good at googling the right kind of questions.

Anyway, here's the requirements...

1. Update every customer record with a new photo.
2. Choose the photo from a subset of 10 or 12 stock pictures.
3. Try to make sure that "consecutive" customer records don't have the same photo.

The first thing that takes figuring out is how to load an image from a file into a table. For some reason google-ing this didn't do too good. In the end it's pretty easy. The following command loads an image file into a blob-style object for use in t-sql...

Note that you need the rowset descriptor "as i". Otherwise you'll receive some error about corelations.

Next I wanted to build a temporary table of customer id's and picture id's. Something like...

Customer1 Picture1
Customer2 Picture2
Customer3 Picture3
Customer4 Picture1
Customer5 Picture2
...

This would make a somewhat random picture list where at least adjacent customers wouldn't have the same picture. I accomplished this using the ROW_NUMBER() function against our customer code's.

Once we've got these two pieces together we can generate our test data pretty reliably. Here's the final sql script ...

We recently began using the Sourcegear Vault Enhanced Client for Visual Studio. Intermittently we would receive errors accessing our Vault Server. Something to the effect of...

One of the key ideals behind Electronic Document Management is that it's supposed to save you money. The idea is that by eliminating some of the paper requirements you can cut down on supply and maintenance costs. It's one of those arguments that I've heard a number of times and to be honest I'd mostly ignored it.

My thought was that KNOWING you had electronic copies of each service order was well worth the investment and that the ongoing management and filing of these documents had such a time savings that the financial ramifications weren't as big a deal. Turns out I was wrong...

So here's the premise...

Each work order written inside of a Dealer Management System typically consists of 6 copies.

1 x Hard Copy approving the work.
1 x Technician Copy, so the tech's can note their work.
2 x Closing Copy, one for the customer, one for the dealership.
1 x Warranty Copy for the the manufacturer (if applicable).
1 x Accounting Copy, for the accounting system.

So, a store with 12 technicians doing 5 service orders per day would generate 360 documents per day.

12 techs x 5 service orders x 6 documents per service order = 360 documents

The same store, over the course of a year would generate almost 100,000 service documents.

360 documents per day x 5 days per week x 52 weeks per year = 93,600

Based on our experience each of these documents costs around 4 cents to print. When you take into account paper, toner, and printer wear and tear this adds up pretty quickly.

4 cents per document x 93,600 documents = $3,744 per year.

And these numbers are for an average sized shop!

I still believe that alot of the benefit behind electronic documents is the ability to better manage and store your information, but these kinds of figures do make a compelling financial argument.

I’ll admit that I have a love/hate relationship with Unit Testing.  Unit Testing has absolutely saved my bacon a number of times where a seemingly inconsequential change would have crippled our software. The reality is that the only way you can verify that those tiny changes don’t wreck havoc is to script your testing for known results. By having your build process validate those results you add a very strong safety net to your development process.

But… in most software systems there’s this pesky layer that throws a real wrench into the entire thing – it’s called the database.

The problem is this… a Unit Test is meant to be autonomous. It should be free standing and require no external dependencies. In reality the code you’re executing typically interacts with an existing database and performs INSERTS/UPDATES/DELETES to verify that certain functions still work. What get’s awkward is that the “Unit Test” database is typically an external dependency for your Unit Tests – it just has to be there be in the correct state or the Unit Tests will crash hard. Things like database schema changes, new testing datasets, and changing database locations really screw the unit tests up.

I’m going to describe a solution to this problem that we’ve been using for the last couple weeks. It’s worked extremely well by streamlining issues we had with databast style unit tests and by increasing our code quality. Everything here is based on Visual Studio 2005, nUnit, and nAnt but it’s more the concept that’s interesting.

I came across a great article a couple weeks back about the danger of little issues... the foundation of this article was that every day we get interupted in ways that force us to change what we're focused on, deal with an emergency, and then re-focus back on the task at hand.

This articule suggested that these "shifts" cause us to lose more time then if we could just merrily work through one project at a time... makes sense, huh?  

What's really interesting is that this article suggested that the LITTLE things actually cause you more long-term grief than the big things. The reasoning was that when you come across a big issue you learn in a big way... and subconsciously take action to resolve it in the future. The problem with little issues is that they only take 1/2 an hour to resolve... and you become complacent in resolving them... twice a week... for a year.

Why is this worth mentioning? Today while setting up for our NADA trade show (www.nada.org) I ended up spending an hour trouble-shooting some file location issues on our demo server. It's a stupid virtual-drive issue that only occurs in certain environments and generally takes me about an hour to figure out.

The trouble is that we've grown complacent in spending an hour on this issue... instead of focusing on why we need a virtual-drive in the first place. If we'd reworked our pathing a year ago, I wouldn't get bothered by this every few weeks.

Once you identify the "Little Issue" it's all about committing yourself to resolving it... we're in mad-panic trade show mode right now so let's see what we can do after we get back from San Francisco...

To be continued...

I just found an outstanding configuration element inside of cruise control which allows you to setup multiple projects to run in a queued environment. Basically it functions as a mutex so that while one project is building all other projects go into a queue until the first project is completed, and then another one is given control. The configuration element is really easy, here's our ccnet.config...

<cruisecontrol>

  <project name="Source Control" queue="ReleaseBuild">
    <workingDirectory>C:\Projects\dvt-root</workingDirectory>
    <triggers>
      <intervalTrigger seconds="180" />
    </triggers>
    <modificationDelaySeconds>10</modificationDelaySeconds>
    <sourcecontrol type="vault" autoGetSource="true" applyLabel="false">
      <executable>c:\program files\sourcegear\vault client\vault.exe</executable>
      <username>BuildUserName</username>
      <password>BuildPassword</password>
      <host>myDevtServer</host>
      <repository>Evolution</repository>
      <folder>$/Dvt-Root</folder>
      <useWorkingDirectory>false</useWorkingDirectory>
      <ssl>False</ssl>
      <setFileTime>current</setFileTime>
    </sourcecontrol>
  </project>

  <project name="Release Esenaar" queue="ReleaseBuild">
    <workingDirectory>C:\Projects\dvt-root</workingDirectory>
    <triggers>
      <intervalTrigger seconds="180" />
    </triggers>
    <tasks>
       <nant>
        <baseDirectory></baseDirectory>
        <buildArgs>-D:debug=False</buildArgs>
        <buildFile>Release.Esenaar.Build</buildFile>
        <buildTimeoutSeconds>1200</buildTimeoutSeconds>
        <targetList>
          <target>build</target>
        </targetList>
      </nant>
    </tasks>
  </project>
 
  <project name="Release Duvel" queue="ReleaseBuild">
    <workingDirectory>C:\Projects\dvt-root</workingDirectory>
    <triggers>
      <intervalTrigger seconds="180" />
    </triggers>
    <tasks>
       <nant>
        <baseDirectory></baseDirectory>
        <buildArgs>-D:debug=False</buildArgs>
        <buildFile>Release.Duvel.Build</buildFile>
        <buildTimeoutSeconds>1200</buildTimeoutSeconds>
        <targetList>
          <target>build</target>
        </targetList>
      </nant>
    </tasks>
  </project>

</cruisecontrol>

The first "project", called "Source Control" is actually responsible for downloading all our code from SourceGear Vault. You can see that every 180 seconds it downloads the source code from vault to a local folder called C:\Projects\dvt-root.

The second and third projects, called "Duvel" and "Esenaar" (maintenance release names), actually call out to our nant script and compile the appropriate release.

Now, our primary goal with all this is to make sure that we don't pull down source code while we're compiling a release (and vice versa) and that's where the queue property on the project comes into play. By setting the queue on all three projects to be the same thing, cruise control will not allow two projects to execute at the same time!

http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Project+Configuration+Block

This dll is basically our interface to the signature pad itself and would fail with a FileNotFoundException. What was really strange was that the exception contained no information about the file it was trying to load. In addition, 95% of clients worked fine the first time. On the remaining 5% as soon as we started troubleshooting by installing Windows Updates or any other sample apps the error would simply go away.

After using a great little tool called FileMon (www.sysinternals.com) I found that the SigPlusNet.dll was failing on an attempt to find and load msvcr71.dll. Apparently msvcr71.dll is basically a set of C style application methods that are somehow used internally by SigPlusNet. Since this dll is pretty common it appears that on most machines it's installed by something else and so that's why on 95% of machines we had no issues.

Once I modified the install to include this dll, life is wonderful. A very strange unexpected dependancy...

In our most recent release of Aristo Contact Management we've added support for a USB Drivers License Scanner. The basis of this project is that we connect this scanner to the local pc, integrate it into our customer screen, and then use the scanner to read customer information.

We've tried to make this a very simple process... after the user selects the Scan button the reader will whir and buzz as it attempts to pull information from the license. The reader itself accomplishes this by taking a picture of the license and then using text recognition (OCR) to separate the license into different fields we can populate our customer record with.

Once we read this information it automatically updates into the appropriate fields on our screen. In addition, because we're taking a picture of the license, we can also attempt to save a picture of the customer IF the regional license supports it.

At this point we support Canadian and US licenses and pull Name, Address, License and expiry fields.

Now, as a promotion for the first 5 clients who email me (and use Aristo Accounting and Contact Management) we're going to send you a drivers license scanner free! Quantities are limited so drop me an email at freeScanner@pbssystems.com and we'll contact the winners.

With eSignature rolling into larger beta it was time to address some flexibility concerns that had come up at our second pilot store.

Their chief problem was that when they took a signature on a Hard Copy they wanted the software to automatically print two copies at two different printers - one at the Service Counter (for the customer to take home) and one at the back counter (for the technicians). With our first version of eSignature this was awkward because the user was given one prompting screen and would need to use the "print" dialog twice - pretty difficult in a fast paced retail environment.

So... while we were out at our annual dealer conference last week I bounced this idea around with a couple service managers. We came up with the idea of "Document Actions". The idea is that eSignature already managed the layout of the document, it's not that big a stretch to allow it to also manage WHAT we do with the document once we have it. If we allow our document management infrastructure to take care of this we can specify that this document should be printed on Printer A, then printed on Printer B, and finally reviewed with Printer C. The flexibility can all be managed in our Document Layout interface and tailored to the dealerships processes.

Finally it's worth noting that all this new Document Management is only kicked off if you "Enable Document Management" for that specific document type. Once that checkbox is enabled the background, signature capture, and printing is all handled by eSignature - the existing printing control in Service is totally ignored.

Just overcome an extremely challenging problem we've been having. Our COM application was calling out to a dot net assembly through COM Interop and when the dot net assembly returned a response the process would get terminated... no friendly output, error messages, or log entries - just dead.

The solution was to totally REMOVE the Dot Net 2.0 framework and re-install. We tried a REPAIR first but that didn't seem to do anything.

It's worth mentioning that the problem didn't occur when calling into the dot net assembly but rather when it returned something to VB6... very strange.

Anyway, strike another issue off the project wall. Time to move back on to Prospecting!

Addendum> Apparently this issue is caused by one of the Dot Net 2.0 Security Updates from Windows Update! For now we're avoiding this patch.

Yesterday we installed Aristo Vehicle Managment into Alpha at a dealership here in Calgary. We'll be working with them over the next few weeks to iron out any wrinkles as we continue to push forward on our Aristo Front End project. Couple highlights...

A true common vehicle file (which provides for some extremely powerful and concise search capabilities)...

The tree in the top-right corner allows searching by vehicle type according to Make, Model, and Trim level. This search is hierarchical so you can search for any type of unit. We also support search for specific unit types, options, pricing, or even across vehicles that have been sold to customers for potential lease returns.

We've also completed an integrated vehicle screen accessible from all modules. This screen allows all departments to have the same view of a vehicle complete with all vehicle history.

This common UI means that given the right security a user can review and edit any information of a vehicle by selecting the correct View in the top right hand corner. Vehicle history is reported down the right side of the screen and allows immediate access to any "event" (such as a Repair Order or Sales Rep Hold) which has affected this unit.

This project will be the foundation for our further work on Front End and provides a major step forward on the Aristo Front End project.

Our Front End Aristo project is going to be managed by what we call a Product Team. A Product Team is basically three individuals who will make it their top priority to achieve deployment of the Aristo Front End application. Each of these individuals has an inherent goal for the project and by working together as a team will come to a consensus on these goals. The Team is made up of the following...

Strategic Product Manager (Dave)

The Strategic Product Manager is responsible for understanding what the market demands of the product. It is their responsibility to understand business cases, market requirements, as well as scheduling demands.

Technical Product Manager (Chris)

The Technical Product Manager works to understand what can be built in what amount of time to satisfy the market demands. Their responsibility is to help estimate project timelines and to ensure project milestones are accomplished.

Sales Product Manager (Pat C)

The Sales Product Manager focuses on understanding how the product will be received by the market. Their responsibility is to be THE product expert, to act as a sales and installation resource, and to create excitement around the product.

Starting asap we're going to convene the Product Team daily for 1 hour - no longer - to discuss the finer requirements for this project. Based on these meetings we will create a project schedule defining which features will be implemented in which iteration. Our schedule will be have five 1-week iterations with our Front End module ready for install by the end of our final iteration.

It's an exciting time for this project; by having three resources each focusing on their specific "needs" for this project we should have faster completion, more complete requirements, and a more exciting product release.