What does your application/extension do? What business problem does it solve?
Instant Assets is a total asset and facilities management system designed to
help organisations with a large number of assets, many of which are supplied by
different companies and which need regular preventative maintenance and
servicing often by yet another set of companies.
Instant Assets allows companies to track which assets they own, what the
maintenance history is of those assets and when the next service is due and
details of which company provides the service cover, including details of the
value of the service contract. Instant Assets also provides for email
notification to staff who need to be informed whenever the status of an asset
changes.
How many screens and
entities does this application have?
Instant Assets has a total of:
- 14 entities
- A further 15 queries
- And 37 screens for data entry, data
import, reference data management and reporting
Did LightSwitch save
your business money? How?
LightSwitch allowed
this application to be built very quickly by a single developer. The available
extensions meant that we did not have to reinvent the wheel and were able to
add fairly complex functionality very quickly.
Would this application
still be built if you didn?t have LightSwitch? If yes, with what?
We had a Silverlight
version already 50% completed when we decided to evaluate LightSwitch. We love
Silverlight and it is very productive but LightSwitch (which is Silverlight
based anyway) allowed us to complete v1 of this product far faster.
How many users does
this application support?
Instant Assets is
designed to benefit organisations with a large number of assets and the LightSwitch
architecture allows for an unlimited number of users.
How long did this
application take to actually build using LightSwitch?
Elapsed time,
including design and scoping through to development and testing was probably
only 2 weeks.
Does this application
use any LightSwitch extensions? If so, which ones? Did you write any of these
extensions yourself? If so, is it available to the public? Where?
Instant Assets was
made possible in LightSwitch by the availability of really good extentions. We used:
How did LightSwitch
make your developer life better? Was it faster to build compared to other
options you considered?
The key advantage of
LightSwitch over using Silverlight directly is the speed with which screens can
be created. For some features as opening up an ?add new data item? you don?t
even need to build a specific screen, LightSwitch just takes care of that for
you. However when you do need it, you can always build a Silverlight custom
control. Brilliant!
Screenshots
Figure 2 - Asset Management Screen
Figure 3 - Filter asset list with user defined criteria
Figure 4 - Know where your service contractors are coming from!
Figure 5 - Report on assets you own
Figure 6 - Easily import new assets
Code and Techniques
The good news is that Instant Assets doesn?t use code or techniques that are
particularly clever. All the code used can be found in the LightSwitch blogs
and forums.
