Instant Assets

Delordson Kallon

5.00/5 (5 votes)

Dec 19, 2011

CPOL

3 min read

41148

The one stop shop for all your asset, equipment and facilities management needs

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:

Bing Maps (http://www.microsoft.com/maps/)
Document Toolkit for LightSwitch (http://firstfloorsoftware.com/documenttoolkit/lightswitch/)
Reporting and Data Editors for LightSwitch (http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/LightSwitch/)
Microsoft LightSwitch Extensions
LightSwitch Filter Control (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight/Filter-Control-for-Visual-90fb8e93)
And of course Themes from www.LightSwitchExtras.com

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.