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| .NET Competency Center |
| The .NET competency center was setup at Altius Solutions in October 2001 as soon as the .NET Public Beta 1 was made available. It focuses on different technology options available in .NET, developing tools / utilities to ease the application construction by performing proof of concepts and building internal / external applications. The competency center closely follows the changing .NET releases, from Beta 1 till the recently released 2.0 Beta 1. |
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| The .NET competency center focuses on different areas of .NET with dedicated team of experts doing in-depth analysis and research on specific areas. The .NET competency center focuses on all facets of development activities to make the whole process of project development faster. The .NET competency center thus has the following focus areas, namely, |
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Components |
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Methodologies |
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Tools |
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.NET Enterprise Servers |
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Developing Proof Of Concept applications (POC) on .Net technologies |
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.NET based Solutions |
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| People |
| The center is staffed by a set of experts who have a long history of working with Microsoft technologies. The members in the center are certified as Microsoft Certified Application Developers for .NET (MCAD.NET) or Microsoft Certified Solution Developers for .NET (MCSD.NET). The center boasts of a Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) as a technical architect. |
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| Components |
| The center researches and develops .NET components that will help application development on .NET. This includes components like XP Style Menus and toolbars, remoting components, layout management components, dockable windows etc. |
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| Methodologies |
| The methodologies team in the center focuses on different methodologies that will improve the speed to market and quality of the application being built. It works with the tools group to create tools that will ease the use of different methodologies. |
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| Tools |
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The tools group works with other teams to create tools that will help in the use of the component or in the implementation of the methodology. Tools like build tools, unit testing harness tools, remoting servers etc. have been built by the tools team at the .NET competency center. |
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| .NET Enterprise Servers |
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This group focuses on the different .NET enterprise servers that Microsoft has been releasing in the recent times and builds competency on the same. This team has worked with servers like MS SQL Server 2000, BizTalk 2002, Commerce Server 2002, SharePoint Portal Server 2001. This group also look at upcoming servers like the Windows .NET Server etc. |
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| Proof of Concept application development (POC) |
The group as part of competency development builds a number of sample applications for Proof Of Concept of various .Net technologies. One of the sample applications called 'Ship Fast', implements a shipping agent's B2B and B2C exchange. It makes use of Commerce Server 2002 for B2C and BizTalk Server 2002 for B2B operations. The entire application has been developed using the following languages and tools:
C#
ASP.Net
COM components
Commerce Server API
Biz Talk API. |
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| The shipping agent and the shipping agency use disparate systems, different business protocols and document formats. The BizTalk server 2002 is used to implement B2B integration between these two systems. |
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| Another example of sample application for POC is a purchase order application. The application has been architected to provide client independence in such a way that both Windows GUI and the Web GUI share most of the code. This provides a methodology and basis for offering different kinds of GUI (thick client and thin client) for the same server application. |
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| .NET based solutions |
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The .NET competency center also uses the technical expertise it has in creating custom .NET based solutions for different clients. The center has provided a web-based solution to a healthcare major based out of US, which has received major accolades from the client. The center is also providing .NET based solution to a insurance major to create a new web based access to its legacy mainframe based data. |
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