March 04 newsletter  


 

Dataworks monthly newsletter - 7th edition
Welcome to the March issue of our newsletter. The demand for custom software applications is continuing to grow steadily with Dataworks heading up a number of innovative projects for some of the leading manufacturing companies in the South East. We are also pleased to welcome Waterford Stanley to our client list in the web development area.

In 'The Leading Edge' technology news this month an interesting article featuring new developments in .NET allowing websites to be 'cached' on web servers to improve general performance. Should you want to unsubscribe, simply click on the link provided at the end of the page and type "remove" as the subject.

 

Dataworks develops Corrective Action Tracking System
In a series of bespoke applications currently being developed for an international engineering company this month, is a Corrective Action Tracking System. This system developed in VB.NET will allow our customer to track health, safety and environment corrective actions raised throughout the plant and ensure that all corrective actions that are raised are monitored and acted upon within the due dates. The application also includes a logon screen, a user maintenance screen and an access maintenance screen to administer a user's status giving it appropriate access to the system.

Waterford Stanley chose Dataworks as its web development partner of choice for the upgrade and maintenance of their website at www.waterfordstanley.com. The company actively markets and sells its range of state-of-the-art cast iron cookers and stoves under the 'Stanley' and 'Waterford' brand names. All products are individually handcrafted. A number of changes to the site are currently in progress to further enhance the visual impact of the Waterford Stanley website. Amongst them is the redesign of the homepage, which will feature animations and new sections such as recipes and tips to improve on the user's experience & further reinforce the brands.

Dataworks secures major contract with RD&E ( Research Development & Engineering ) Division in the American head quarters of a leading multinational medical devices manufacturing company. The contract involves both software development and system integration, some of which will be done remotely. Local involvement with the manufacturer grew over the years from the initial development of discrete applications to an entire Shop Floor Information System with recent international roll-out. 'The contract with the US based RD&E division of the company reinforces our position as long-term development partner providing valuable expertise and an innovative approach' concludes Liam Curham, Director at Dataworks

 

ASP.NET - Caching

Due to the nature of the Web it is necessary for developers to look at implementations that improve performance. One method of improving performance that has been implemented by Dataworks developers on the Waterford Institute of Technology's forestry web site (www.forvams.org) was 'caching'.

In general, caching is the temporary storage of state for faster retrieval. There are different types of caching available for web applications. For the forestry site, the caching implemented is on the web server itself. Three types of caching available through ASP.NET are 'Page', 'Fragment' (partial page) and 'Data Caching'. These are directly applicable to ASP.NET and should be used, at least to some extent, in any web application built with ASP.NET.

An example of caching would be to take a web control such as the news archive menu on this particular site. In this case an ASP.NET web control (basically mini pages within a page to make up different sections), which is dynamically created but remains static across all pages on the site. Rather than the web server processing the code for this control every time it is requested it is cached using 'fragment caching'. Any subsequent access to the same control (which will occur as the user navigates each page of the site) will be returned from the cache, saving the time it would have taken to dynamically generate the page.

Article by Sam Whelan, Senior developer, ASP.Net specialist at Dataworks

 
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