jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Apr 12 21:12:35 CDT 2011
Ken, This stuff is all C# / SQL Server (and a Virtual Machine running a third party app) and is not the same as my framework in Access. This thing is really a custom written application specific to the needs of a single client. I wrote it and have re-factored it a couple of times as my knowledge increased in C#. It is slowly turning into an impressive system. I really wrote it because I was doing everything manually and it was a PITA, error prone (because it was all manual) and just plain not fun! The more I automated the process, the more the client was impressed. To this day the client really has no idea what what the system looks like or how it really works. He is in New York and I am in NC, and he basically has no knowledge of what is involved to do this stuff. He has his business, and I have mine - which is to make his business hum. What impresses him is that he knows (because I billed him for the hours) that doing an order used to take two days for the simplest order. Now it takes well under a day and for simple orders it can be done in a few hours. He used to send me count requests and it used to take an hour and it was a big enough pain that I might not get the results back to him until the next day. Now I get the count order and I can get the results back to him in 5-10 minutes if I can give it my immediate attention. I now have a program where I select a CSV file containing zips and the program does the counts, I press a button and the counts are pasted into an email and emailed off to him (and CC myself). So while he can't see the system (or understand it if he could) he can *feel* the system. I didn't do this to impress the customer I did this to keep the customer and to save my sanity. I now have nine lists which total about 350 million names, and I really need to process every list every month. I can only process 2 million names at a time through the third party software and each chunk takes about 50 minutes average. That's 175 chunks * 50 minutes of processing monthly - 146 hours of computer time every month. To do this stuff "manually" took me 2-3 times that long I am finally getting to the point where the system can do all of that unattended. And... I can process orders on-the-fly and they will break into the queue and jump to the head of the processing line. I'm here to tell you I could not do that manually, and if I were able to the customer would not be willing to pay me the hours required to do that. It really is an impressive system and it has been written (evolved really) starting somewhere around December 2009, so about 16 months, and I was learning C# as I went, which explains much of the refactoring. Now I finally get to relax a little bit and enjoy the fruits of my labor. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com On 4/12/2011 4:11 PM, Kenneth Ismert wrote: > All, > >> jwcolby: >> ... >> But in general the class functions are only used in the class. A function >> can be made to accept args and return a value and never modify anything >> external to itself. It would make programming some functionality much more >> complicated however. Let's take an example. ... >> > > You have a very impressive system with a lot of capability. But frameworks > have their own inertia: for all that they do, they unquestionably limit your > choices and reduce your options for their sheer bulk. I have wrestled with > this in building my own frameworks, and have entirely dismissed third party > frameworks (Symphony comes to mind) for the thunderous overhead they impose.