Ever Onwards with our Technology

Over the past few years we've steadily worked on our CRM and CMS software and have added new features and capabilities to it. However, while we were busy doing that the technologies that the software is built on was itself undergoing changes, some of which we made use of while others we chose to ignore. Fortunately those changes/enhancements usually maintain backwards compatibility with code that's already been written and so it rarely if ever breaks existing code.

But that doesn't mean that we should just ignore the new technologies that have been introduced, and as you will see both from our web site navigation menu and recent blog posts a good example of that is our adoption of cloud technologies such as Microsoft Office 365. However, there are other new technologies that are related more to the platform that we write our code on (the .Net Framework). 

Since it's introduction over 10 years ago the .Net Framework has slowly evolved and has tried to keep abreast of changes in development practices, and with Visual Studio Microsoft has also tried to influence them. But that evolution has meant that on occasions its been behind current best practices, especially with regards to the web and mobile.

We first started developing ConvallisCRM just after Visual Studio 2008 had been released along with .Net 3.5 and so it seemed sensible at that time to make use of those 'latest' technologies as we designed the CRM. That meant that with the Windows version of ConvallisCRM we took advantage of Windows Presentation Foundation, which is a far more flexible environment than the traditional Windows forms. But with the web version I decided to stick with ASP.Net Web forms, back then ASP.Net MVC was still quite new (especially to me), and I'd already decided to adopt a technology called Linq to SQL for the data access and so I felt like I wanted to stick with a technology I was more comfortable with on the web side of things.

But here we are in 2013 and the .Net framework and its accompanying technologies have evolved quite a lot since then. So much so that the ASP.Net technologies have been split from the core .Net framework and are evolving and being released at a faster pace, which gives Microsoft greater flexibility when keeping up with latest trends and practices. 

Thus a few weeks ago when I began thinking about an upcoming web project it seemed like a good idea to take stock and evaluate the latest web and .Net technologies. I liked what I saw and decided that it was time to adopt these technologies and start using them in our projects. But more about that next time...