Dan Johansson - Industrial & Financial Systems (IFS) | Inside Out

Here, we talk to Dan Johansson, CIO of the Swedish company Industrial and Financial Systems (IFS). We have a candid conversation about the problems his company solves and the technologies they use. We also get some good, honest feedback from him regarding our software.

This is the first episode in the customer-oriented Channel 9 show Inside Out where we focus on the people who use some of our technologies to innovate and solve problems in the real world.

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footloose

Nov 20, 2006 at 1:10 PM

It’s interesting to learn that smart clients are used by enterprise applications vendors. Personally I think that smart clients and click once deployment is one of the most overlooked feature of the .Net framework. I also wonder why MS dynamics application does not leverage that technology. Even though MS CRM is a masterpiece in building web applications, the product would definitely benefit if the GUI was a richer smart client application!
staceyw Before C# there was darkness...

Nov 20, 2006 at 2:05 PM

footloose wrote:

It’s interesting to learn that smart clients are used by enterprise applications vendors. Personally I think that smart clients and click once deployment is one of the most overlooked feature of the .Net framework. I also wonder why MS dynamics application does not leverage that technology. Even though MS CRM is a masterpiece in building web applications, the product would definitely benefit if the GUI was a richer smart client application!

I agree. Web page is fine for browsing and such, but I don't want it as a primary app UI - no thanks. More WPF and less html imo.
bogdan.nedelcu

Nov 27, 2006 at 12:39 PM

I had the chance to work in a customisation of the IFS applications 6 years ago, when they were using only Oracle as data and business tire. I came from a C++ perspective and had to adapt to the Oracle procedural-like kind of language. I found IFS development environment impressive. They made Oracle packages programmable as objects, they were simulating inheritance, something close to how XWindows (X11) was programmed in pure C and #DEFINE's . There I saw the first serialization engine which acted as the transport mechanism between layers (written in PL/SQL). Pure interfaces with hidden implementation, modules, asynchronous jobs, long running transactions, compensations, and so on. Hope I'm not violating any copyright laws

I was impressed by the architecture they were having back then and I am sure they made big steps. Maybe Dan can share with us more of the challanges they overcome over the years. I liked his interview and want to have more. I belive that the challanges we are confronting now are not new, they were 6-7 years ago: modularity, decoupling, deployment, etc. Some of us made it possible without using .NET, J2EE or other technologies (IFS is a living example), so the solution does not lie in the technology but somewere else. Thanks Dan for pointing this out.

Real-life examples are very important for a platform provide like Microsoft. I salute the initiaitve and hope for more.