Month: June 2019
How ASP.Net MVC helped in getting stuff done quickly
As part of my “How I did..” series, this is probably my first blog sharing about how I used ASP.Net’s MVC & other related tools to develop required modules very quickly. Putting right tool to work at right time in right place is an Art. We have a lot of technological stuff around us and being a developer or I should say being a Web Based Application Developer we need to choose technology wisely to develop things before getting hands dirty into real battle-field.
Before I start, let me give you a soft introduction to the organization where back in 2015 I was given the task to automate things from zero.. yes real Zero. Its was an educational organization having 50+ departments and over 2200 employees consisting on Teaching Faculty, Administration Officers and other supporting staff, and approximately 5000 active students enrolled in 5 different programs and we were a team of just two developers who knew programming – with no new hiring chances as hiring employees in public-sector organizations is a long process. Me, having experience of a decade that time had to lead the other person who was ready to help me in my technical decisions by all means. All the departments were operating independently having no centralized connected system, most of them were using MS Excel as data storage tool and a very few were using their own MS Access DBs to manage their records. Again I should remind this was on departmental level having no centralized connectivity. My immediate boss asked to get started with the work on automation process quickly to bear the pressure of other departments on IT Team, and we were unable to purchase any developed-software due to some un-writtable ground reasons.
The list of processes we were asked to automate started with Purchasing, Expenditures, Income, Budgeting, Employee Records (Human Resource) Management, Student Records, Fee & Dues calculations & receivables and our in-house Health Assurance Department.
Tools in Hand
The development tools we had in hand back that time were:
- Visual Studio 2012
- SQL SERVER 2008
Starter Site Template
In MVC 4 there was a starter site template available to get started with a simple website.
ASP.NET Identity
First thing first – We had to manage records of all Employees and Students around whom whole system had to revolve. Keeping in mind the fact at some point in near future we will allow them to login into the system to check their records, I simply decided to move on with ASP.Net Membership feature to quickly get the base infrastructure done for managing users in that system.