Gurango Software

Gurango Software is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in .NET applications that integrate with Microsoft Dynamics.

The Problem

Gurango Software had an existing n-tier software product that they wanted to update to add the following new capabilities: (a) support for client-server and n-tier deployments, (b) incorporate WCF, and (3) support for multiple, distributed databases. They had to decide between extending the existing code, which was already getting quite difficult to maintain, or do a total re-write.

Why DevForce?

During the month-long evaluation and POC process, the Gurango Software development team determined that:

1. Support for client-server and n-tier deployments of their application would be practically “automatic” when using DevForce in conjunction with the IdeaBlade Business Object Server (BOS);
   
2. Support for WCF would be “baked” into the resulting code that they would produce using DevForce, and;
   
3. The effort required to support multiple, distributed databases would be greatly simplified by the DevForce O-R Mapper, because those multiple data sources would essentially be reduced to a set of entities that the programmers could write their business logic against, without needing to know anything about the underlying data sources.

With this realization came the confidence that it would be much better to re-design the database structures and re-write the entire application using DevForce, while following the “best practices” that this tool recommends and enforces.

The Solution

Gurango Software estimated that the effort to extend the existing code would require about 5 months. After spending about a month evaluating DevForce and creating some POC’s to test its capabilities, the company decided to perform a total re-write using the tools from IdeaBlade. Based on the month-long evaluation, they estimated that the total re-write could not only be done in the same amount of time with the same number of resources, but that the resulting code would also be more stable and easier to maintain.

As it turns out, their estimates were a bit off. The company was able to complete the re-write in three months (instead of the estimated five months), while still adding all three of the new capabilities that the team had hoped for.

After just three months of development, and using the same number of resources, Gurango Software has a completely re-written application that is based on the latest .NET technologies. The resulting code is cleaner, more uniform across modules, and significantly easier to maintain than the original codebase. The additional license cost of employing the BOS was more than made up for by the reduced time-to-market and increased sales opportunities that having a modern .NET application offered the company.

Gurango Software has two other commercial software products that are now being prepared for a re-write using DevForce, both of which will be released within the next 12 months.