Swiss Colony:

Upgrading Old Architecture

This job was really all about upgrading a VB6 application. Swiss Colony uses a set of windows applications and services to manage their package processing line.

They asked me to add some additional functionality and remove a few quirky behaviors. Though the source code had been ported into .Net, the architecture was still mired in its VB6 roots. It was not object-oriented; minimal encapsulation, no Inheritance, no Interfaces, etc. So the first thing to do was to re-architect the software. Then I added the new functionality.

 The drawing below shows a top level reorganization of the assemblies.

Now the quirks are gone, the new functionality is in, and, as an added bonus, the line runs faster than before (by several packages a minute).