Review by Jeremy Haggard

The company I work for is big into 3rd party applications. However the last company I worked for we wrote everything because it allowed us better control and we could design the exact systems we wanted, not buy a solution off the shelf and then adapt our processes to fit it. So I was able to convince my supervisor that the company could benefit if I got this software and we pulled the trigger. Fast forward a year later I have already written several applications to monitor enterprise systems, I’ve create applications to expedite the way we support stores and created a release scheduling tool and intranet website to share the information across the company.

Each project I started didn’t take long at all to complete. I came from a VB6 background so the jump to .NET was interesting as many of the terms and code changed, but in an easier way.

I’m now on the verge of getting more copies of this software for my other team members so that we can all work on the various applications and save the company more money. After all, $400 for software that lets you develop your own tools is a lot cheaper then the $10,000 that you could spend on a big box solution which doesn’t do everything you want.

I will say that this isn’t a perfect program. I have often times had the program crash on me and offer to let me debug Visual studio while I was running visual studio debugging an app I wrote… Yes I was debugging the debugger. So there are issues but for the most part it works great and has increased the productivity and value I can bring to the company. In fact I started with VB6, learned VB.NET within a few days and when it came time to making the ASP intranet site I learned that from scratch, about 3 weeks later I had a fully functional site up and running and even made a mobile blackberry version.