Common Sense Technology for Small & Medium Business

Application Solutions provided by MPV Systems Inc are built with Microsoft Tools. All Windows Forms and Web Applications are built in Visual Studio 2008 using either the C# 3.0 or VB9 languages. Applications and utilities may also be built with tools such as MS Access at a client’s request, however, since the release of Visual Studio 2005 I feel that there are few remaining benefits in doing so.

Prior to 2006 I wrote many ERP widgets in VBA on the MS Office platform using a MS Access front end coupled to a commercial database engine such as Oracle or SQL Server. Although VB6 was Microsoft’s “professional” development platform for many years, its applications were notoriously difficult and expensive to install and maintain. The portability of applications built in MS Access repeatedly proved to make them more cost effective for small business applications; they had virtually no installation requirements since they ran on the MS Office platform and they consisted of a single reliable and portable file that could be easily distributed to clients on a network. In addition to a ‘one-file’ installation and excellent portability, MS Access was specifically designed for developing small client–side database applications and provided many built-in RAD (rapid application development) features including the Jet database engine which was great for managing small local datasets on the client-side.

The advantages of MS Access discussed above have only recently been surpassed with the dotNET framework. This platform overcomes the installation and maintenance issues of the past with a ‘one-click’ distribution system. ADO.NET provides client-side data management and storage capabilities with its in-memory Data objects that can be persisted to XML files. In addition to these technologies the Visual Studio development environment offers many new and valuable functions that enable the developer to be more productive. Most notable among these are refactoring and unit testing tools. A final and important benefit is that C# and VB9 are fully certified object oriented languages. This provides the developer with the capability to use true object methodology as well as traditional coding techniques.

When an Application requires Stored Procedures or Triggers to be added to a database these are prepared in the SQL language extension required by the database engine.

Software Technology Expertise

Visual Manufacturing ERP Specialists

Business Application Development

Microsoft .NET

C# .Net, VB.Net, ASP.Net, ADO.Net

Microsoft Office

VBA, VBS, Access, Word, Excel and related APIs

Database Design and Development

Oracle, SQL Server, MS Access