Products

The deliverable provided by DevSmith, LLC will depend upon your specific business need. Some examples of deliverables provided by DevSmith to our clients:

Stone Edge Technologies Order Manager & Subscription Manager

DevSmith LLC has extensive knowledge of the Stone Edge Technologies platform. Stone Edge's primary application, the Order Manager, written in Microsoft Access Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), is designed to be customized or to accept add-on components to extend business functionality. Some examples of major add-ons delivered include:

A custom inventory tracking system for a company that purchased used cell phones and needed to track individual units through evaluation, repair and cleaning prior to making the device available for resale.
A custom inventory tracking system for a company that roasted and blended their own coffee from green coffee beans. The company needed to track green product, the loss from the roasting process and distribution of the roasted product to various sales products through blending.
A custom point of sale system for use by a state employees union who sold specialty items to the employees at varying discounts. Employee sales history, product sales limits and discount tiers were key features of this deliverable.
A custom subscription management system which allowed for products to be labelled as a subscription with one or more shippable items to be delivered according to a user defined schedule. This deliverable evaluates open subscriptions on demand and builds customer orders automatically. It can also assess orders imported by the Order Manager from websites to evaluate online subscription purchases. After customer delivery, this product was resold by Stone Edge Technologies as the Subscription Manager.
A custom backorder fulfillment system for a B2B company who needed a way to centralize multiple backorders from separate orders for the same customer into a single fulfillment order.

DevSmith has provided additional customizations for Stone Edge customers including:

Custom Reporting
Custom user interfaces within Order Manager using either native Microsoft Access forms or through the use of C# and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
Shopping Cart Integrations
Credit Card Gateway Integrations
Custom Ribbons
Custom Hardware Support
Custom C# Libraries (.dlls) for third party integration for Tax Calculations, Card Payments, Shipping Carriers and hardware components
Custom System Parameters
Custom setup and installation in a Terminal Server environment to serve up the Order Manager application as a RemoteApp
Order Manager installation and configuration
SQL Server (Standard or Express) installation and configuration
SQL Server Management Studio installation
SQL Server Reporting Services installation and report creation

Microsoft Access Source Code Control System

A custom program written using Microsoft Access which permits the use of GIT or other source code control software for applications written using Microsoft Access. This application permits import/export of one or more Microsoft Access objects (Forms, Reports, Macros, Modules, Queries, Tables, Properties, etc.) from/to text or xml based files. The application can be run manually by a user or from a command line where the application is controlled by a code deployment system.

Windows Console Applications

DevSmith has delivered dozens of custom programs written using C# Language for use in automated processes which run infrequently. An example would include file archiving tasks where the application may run once a month to move files from an active location to an archive for long term storage. Another option would be to remove log records from databases each month or each quarter or check on the health of another automation system every few hours. Console applications can be run manually, however, in most cases these types of applications are triggered by Windows Scheduler or called by another automation process. There is no limit to the potential of a console application to help automate your business processes.

Windows Desktop User Applications

DevSmith has delivered several custom applications written using C# Language and the .Net Framework. Each system is designed to the customer's internal specifications and are typically built using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for the user interface which offers outstanding design flexibility with an MVVM(MVC) test driven business architecture to permit multiple UIs to leverage the same underlying business logic.

Windows Desktop Automation Applications

DevSmith has delivered several custom applications which are similar in scope to a user application as described above but are designed to run unattended. An example would be to evaluate and display workday performance metrics to one or more large screen monitors throughout a business office or warehouse. These types of applications can be designed to pull metrics from any type of data source and display results as charts or other quickly read graphics for real-time knowledge throughout the business day.

Windows Services

DevSmith has delivered dozens of applications which run as single or multi-threaded Windows Services. A Windows Service does not include a user interface and is designed to operate 24/7/365. Some examples of services produced include:

Sending email from an outbound transactional email queue fed by various applications
An Email Merge utility which reads a queue containing an email "template" which is subsequently "merged" with the data points relevent to the context
Sending website shipment notifications and tracking data from an outbound queue tied to warehouse packing stations
Sending website inventory change notifications from an outbound queue tied to warehouse receiving or packing stations
Processing database records which must pass through multiple evaluation steps in a specific order (throttling)
Importing infomation from external entities such as databases or websites on fixed schedule

These types of applications are also built using C# and the .Net Framework. Services which are designed as multi-threaded automatically scale the number of worker threads which are running internally in response to a given queue backlog. As backlog rises, more workers are added to handle data processing. As the queue empties, the number of workers are automatically reduced to free memory and processor demands.

Web Services

Similar in nature to Windows Services, Web Services are also intended to be automated applications which run constantly and do not have a graphic interface. The key difference is that these types of services are designed using C# and .Net Core technologies allowing the applications to run on either a Windows or a Linux platform. Most often these services are deployed using Containerization for scalability and mission criticality. Common container technologies we have used include Docker for containerization and Kubernetes for container management.

Relational Database Management Systems

Many of the systems delivered by DevSmith depend on relational databases to store information critical to application or business performance. Database applications that DevSmith has maintained or enhanced include Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL platforms. We have extensive background in the design, development and optimization of tables, queries, views, functions, procedures and triggers to enhance both database and application performance and to enhance business data requirements. Many database automations have also been delivered which are designed to operate at the database layer via the use of Jobs or Events permitting scheduling of business operations. We have also delivered a number of customizations using the SQL CLR (Common Language Runtime) which allows SQL Server to run business code written in C# from within a procedure. The CLR interface allows SQL Server to be customized to your needs well beyond the capability of Structured Query Language. DevSmith has also entertained communications via the use of the SQL Server Service Broker which is a system used for messaging between one database and another or between a database and an application or service.