Case Study: The Successful Design and Development of a Scalable Application Using the .NET Platform

Technical / Non-Technical

Russel L. Montchal Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts Senior IT Development Analyst	Dan Hyde Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts Senior IT Development Analyst	David D. Solivan Architect Evangelist National .NET Adoption Team Microsoft Corporation	David Armstrong Senior Consultant Microsoft Consulting Services State and Local Government

Date: Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 pm
Room: Monarch Room B

In mid-2001, the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts began development of its Administrative Services Application Program (ASAP) to handle the growing needs of the agency. This system handles the payroll, budgeting, human resource and financial application needs for the judicial branch. The determination was made during project design to develop the application using the new .NET technology. A major challenge designing and developing in a new platform is acquiring an understanding of the new technology so that best practices can be employed during application development.

The team worked through this major challenge and decided upon a multi-tiered architecture where the presentation and middle tiers were coded predominantly in Visual Basic .NET along with a SQL Server 2000 database tier. Also, Crystal Reports 9.0 was used in combination with the .NET technology to provide the needed form/reporting solution. In addition to seeing a demonstration of the new application, this case study will show how the ASAP software development team was able to overcome the challenges inherent in using a new technology and how it took advantage of the groundbreaking improvements delivered in the .NET platform.

Presenters:

Russel L. Montchal
Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts
Senior IT Development Analyst

Dan M. Hyde
Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts
Senior IT Development Analyst

Russel and Dan have 10 years experience in application development. For the past 3 years they have been Senior IT Development Analysts with the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, heading up all new development projects, where they focus on enterprise application development methods, tools and architectures. Russel and Dan had spent their previous 7 years working for a company called Electronic Data Systems (EDS) where they lead various software development projects.

David D. Solivan
Architect Evangelist
National .NET Adoption Team
Microsoft Corporation

David Solivan is an Architect Evangelist on Microsoft's National .NET Adoption Team. The .NET Adoption Team serves the Industry Solutions Group both across and within 4 industry verticals: financial, public sector, retail, and healthcare. The .NET Adoption Team works directly with Microsoft account teams to create strategic .NET competitive wins within targeted enterprise accounts in each vertical. David is responsible for driving excitement about the .NET platform and tools within the Architect community in these accounts so that customers add .NET to their standards lists and initiate .NET pilot projects. David has specific expertise in the .NET Framework, enterprise product standardization and system integration strategies. He has relevant experience in Visual Basic development (COM and .NET), SQL Server, ASP/ASP.NET, server side Java, UML and design patterns. He is a skilled trainer and public speaker and finds his greatest motivation in the look on people's faces when they realize what .NET can do for them.

David's prior work experience includes two years with aligne Consulting as a Principal System Architect where he conducted numerous .NET training engagements for Microsoft's larger Pennsylvania-based clients and worked with Aetna to construct their enterprise integration architecture. While at aligne, he worked with clients primarily in the financial and healthcare sectors (Aetna, Keystone Mercy Health Plans, Cooper Health Systems, De Lage Landen, Arbor Associates, ICON Clinical Research, ASTM) doing architecture assessments, strategic recommendations, BizTalk proof of concept projects and .NET development projects. Prior to that, David served as a senior architect in Aetna's Technology Architecture and Strategy group for three years where he selected standard enterprise products in the Internet application space and supported the team's intranet. In his final year at Aetna he moved to their Provider group as Lead Architect and Lead Developer for WebSphere-based applications.

David holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Carson-Newman College and has completed two years of Masters coursework in Rhetoric and Public Address at the Louisiana State University.

David Armstrong
Senior Consultant
Microsoft Consulting Service
State and Local Government

David Armstrong is a Senior Consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services State and Local Government practice based in Pennsylvania. Mr. Armstrong provides development and architecture guidance to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He was the lead developer for the Pennsylvania Open For Business .NET release and is currently working at the Department of Public Welfare. Mr. Armstrong has over 12 years experience in systems development, consulting, implementation and support in corporate and public sector business. Mr. Armstrong joined Microsoft Consulting Services in March, 1998.

Mr. Armstrong holds a Bachelor of Science degree from West Chester University, and is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer, Microsoft Certified Database Administrator and a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. Prior to joining Microsoft, Mr. Armstrong was a developer for a large healthcare information services provider.