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Company Profile

Client is the largest manufacturer and exporter of colored gemstones and studded jewelry with manufacturing facilities in India and China, sales channels in the US and UK and operates in more than 10 countries at present. The Client has 24 hours jewelry TV channels running in UK, Germany and USA.

Business Situation

Client wanted an application for managing their bidding requirements and sales of jewelry items. Client wanted a single code base for multiple applications used at present so as to achieve auctioning, sales, PnP, discounts, Return and Refunds, Manifesting, Customer Management and Administration etc. The complete Bidding Application was divided into two parts, i.e., Web-based and Windows-based application. Using the Bidding application, a user could create and schedule auctions, exhibit auction items through live TV, call centers, or IVR, manage orders, generate invoices, and manage payments.

Challenges

• The complete web application had to behave as a windows application in terms of screen display to the end user i.e. each page had to open in a different tab and remain live till the time it was manually closed by the user.
• Most of the screens were highly dockable similar to what exists in Microsoft Outlook.
• To understand the flow and functionalities from the existing application.
• Application had to interact with many other applications like JV3, WMS and Brainstorm server and send bidding details on live TV.
• It was to be a Performance centric application as client had set very high performance acceptance criteria such as Stock Results which were to be displayed within 3 seconds etc.
• Search Expression Builder was another feature using which user could create his own search criteria and save it for future use also.
• Application had to maintain Audit Trail for all the changes made in the database via certain sections of UI.
• Client wanted to have zero downtime at the time of deploying new releases of the application.

Solution

Q3 realized the importance of building the application in a technology that helped the client to manage the application. To meet all client requirements, Q3 came up with a team of dedicated developers and proposed the N-Tier .Net architecture with C#, Silverlight/ WPF, MVVM, Untiy Framework (Dependency Injection), WCF services and Entity Framework. The whole application was divided in two parts. One part was a web application in Silverlight and the other one was a Windows based application in WPF. To minimize the redundancy in business layers of multiple applications, the new application was supposed to have single common business layer exposed via WCF services. The advantage of using WCF service was that UI part could be changed without affecting the business layer at all. The application was delivered into multiple development phases. The first development phase contained the Inventory and Scheduler module. Microsoft App Fabric server was used to store the Cache and Session data.

Technologies

Architectural Component	Technologies/Frameworks
Language	C#.NET/.NET Framework 4.0 Silverlight 4.0
Server Software	MS Window Server 2008 - 32 & 64 bit IIS 7.0/ IIS 7.5 .Net Framework 4.0 App Fabric Server
Presentation Tier	Silverlight and WPF using MVVM
Application Tier	Enterprise Library 5.0 Unity Framework 2.1 (Dependency Injection)
Batch Framework	Windows Services
Reporting	SSAS Cubes with UI in Silverlight
Common Services	Common Search Control and Expression Builder which will be used on many screens
Data Tier	SQL Server 2008
Tools	MS Visual Studio 2010 Edition Professional Team Foundation Server Telerik Silverlight Controls
Target Browsers	Firefox 3.6 Chrome 8