Development of EnginSoft Link application

EnginSoft Link Application

One of the projects we completed with TechWire UK is a Link application for EnginSoft UK.

The application serves as an integration point and controlling GUI between EnginSoft’s ModeFrontier, and Innovyze InfoWorks CS. The advantages of using this Link application are described on the EnginSoft’s site, while we can describe below how it was implemented.

Originally this was an EnginSoft’s internal development using Excel scripting (VBA), to leverage Excel’s GUI and data-handling capabilities to prepare and review the values and settings being passed between the two integrated applications. The initial task was to improve the performance and maintainability of the integration by converting the code to C# without changing the algorithms.

The application still uses Excel as the GUI, yet all the major functions are handled by a COM-object written in C#.

After this initial task was completed successfully, there were numerous further enhancements — to implement loop and bifurcation handling, to add Optioneering mode (which involves flexible number of variables passed between the programs, as opposed to the original approach), further improvement to handling large datasets etc.

Feedback

Here is the feedback we received from David Moseley, the Technical Director of EnginSoft UK:

EnginSoft UK Lts has worked with TechWire UK Ltd since April 2009. During that period TechWire have been responsible for writing Windows software to our specification to link 3rd party simulation products to our generic optimisation software. The work has been performed using C#, and prepared as an installable package for our clients.

Our experience of working with TechWire has been very positive. First of all, their ability to understand the nature of the problem at a deeper level than we expected has been very helpful in containing the depth of the technical specifications that we have had to prepare. TechWire have been very pro-active in understanding the full technical picture from our client’s perspective, and helped to guide us in the best approach to solving each problem, well beyond simply responding to the technical scope of the requirement.

We did have concerns, initially, that a programming team at such a distance and maybe with less than perfect English would prove to be unwieldy. However, the very opposite has been consistently the truth. TechWire have invariably been very responsive, fixing any bugs without question within hours, and sometimes within minutes — the remote location of their software team has never been an issue, and their accessibility and speed has helped to give our customers a very good impression of our technical depth: in fact, on several occasions TechWire staff have provided direct customer-facing support for difficult problems.

Overall, I am happy to confirm that we are delighted with the service and value provided by TechWire and have absolutely no hesitation in recommending them for this type of activity.

From our side, we can say that working with EnginSoft is always a pleasure as well, it is great to have a thoughtful, reasonable customer with clear goals and direction.