Monday, March 27, 2006

Learning-phase

The past few months has been really hectic. I was into new projects, in a different role. Could not make time to post here.
There were a lot many new things I had learnt during this phase, came across many a critical situation where thoughts and logic has to be utilized to the best. Finally, yes, all the situations were solved.

one of the main challenges we had faced was to create a PDF file dynamically using Crystal Reports 9 in VS.NET 2003, and display the dynamic images. Let me explain in detail. The requirement was to create a PDF file that displays the images stored on harddisk for a particular item in the database. These items will be decided based on criteria. All the process is automated.

We had decided to use Crystal Reports. Conversion to PDF was easy, if its displaying the report and then exporting. Runtime, we faced some issues. Thanks to the articles all over the internet, (Will post another article in detail), we solved the issue. Next, the chanllenge was to display images dynamically. CR 9 cannot display dynamic images. It can read only pre-defined images from a location or display from DB. But, we were not using DB to store images, as that would increase the DB load. MySQL was the DB and it has some restrictions regarding GIF, when it comes to CR.
we have to overcome all these issues, and finally, after much thoguh process, we came over. I intend to publish the details in another post, for the ease of developers who face the similar situation.

Next is another challenge, learning .NET 2005 and executing a project with in a short period. Well, we did it. And this time, we faced issues with DB. SQLServer 2005 is different from its earlier versions, and hence some of the regualr commands failed. we have to find our way out. The complexity of the queries that we executed was high. Also, there were lot of dynamic queries.
Thanks to our Database team, we were able to complete it, and it was a learning curve for all of us. A post on the issues we faced during development will done, to help others in work arounds. There are lot issues that we faced in .net 2005 and that was a learning curve.

Now, we are gearing up for the next challenge.

One thing is true, the more the technology advances, the more complex will be the tasks that we execute and complex tasks give immense satisfaction :-)