Project Objective I: Design and write the applications for tomorrows computers. Adapt to the limits of today’s computers only when unavoidable. Since system performance and capacity will continue to double every two years  (Moore’s Law), limiting applications to yesterday’s computers makes no sense.

The UDS Windows project began in 1994. Only top of the line personal computer equipment was used in development of the applications but those limits proved to be difficult to deal with at that time. In fact the initial project was a failure and put on hold for a year because of system limits and limits of the operating system (Windows 3.1). Changing the project scope and releasing a crippled program was not considered to be an option.

Although not planned, early in the project it became obvious that the standard monitor sizes were not going to be adequate for true Windows applications. In recent years 17 inch and larger monitors have become standard on most PC’s. In 1995 they were used only on CAD and imaging systems. It has been interesting to convince our customers to spend the extra money for lowly accounting computers. It is a requirement that your UDS Windows monitors be 17” or larger. Today we recommend a high resolution (1280x1024 or higher) monitor of 19 inches or larger.

Question #I: What language do we use to write the application? The decision today would seem to be obvious but much consideration was given to this subject. At that time there was much competition in the programming languages arena. We decided upon Microsoft Visual Basic.

One of the major reasons we selected VB was because we could get the functions we needed and the data was managed by a database. Visual Basic (and hence UDS software) supports any ODBC compliant database and comes with a Microsoft Access engine. This is the database engine we use in our project. Microsoft SQL Server is also within the scope of this project.

This has several ramifications. The first is that anyone can get at the data if they have Microsoft Access available on their computer. Anyone familiar with any database can use the information contained in the UDS system to create their own reports and manipulate data. Unfortunately anyone that has Access can then change this data and corrupt the entire UDS System if they are not careful.

This possibility is very disconcerting but the reality is that your company may need the information in a form that we do not support or sooner than we can produce. The acceptance of this risk seemed to us to be greatly outweighed by the power of the tools instantly available to our future customers.

Early in the project, like a lot of Microsoft software, there were speed and reliability problems that have been corrected. Access currently is a very powerful platform that we are happy to have as the foundation to our products. Our higher level customers will be able to use this power to their advantage.