Managing the production line progress of a small manufacturing company is vital to successful operations, just as it would be in a larger manufacturing environment. Of course, it's not on the same scale. And the budget just isn't there either for many small manufacturers.

That doesn't mean they have to do without! It just means we get creative in how we resolve certain needs.

I have just one example here, of how we're solving the issue of tracking progress on the production line for one small manufacturer. Maybe this will be helpful for some other small company. Maybe it's a one off solution that will only work for this manufacturer. But you'll find it different, I am sure of that.

The single problem we wanted to solve here is how to get a handle on what's happening in the production line. What's being built, what stage is it at, what step we can know is next, how long will it take. I know - it's basic, but that's were it's at.

We tested this solution on a publically available service, kind of a live beta that was meant to show if the concept was workable before investing any development hours. And it was a job for super Twitter.

Basically, the idea is to record activity as it's happening. Identify the production piece by the use of its Serial number, and use Twitter to track the work stream. That's how we tested to see if the solution would work. We got a private Twitter account setup for each line. We had the line worker Tweet the item number in a hash tag along with the action being taken with that item, Example: "#2009030301 Setup for paint."

What this gives us is the activity, the time started, and the next tweet identifies the time spent.

Once we determined the activity stream would be useful in materials planning activities, we moved this functionality into a Silverlight client, Intranet application. I built a fast and cheap microblogging tool using Silverlight for the client application and a web application service to send the activities to Sql Server backend.  This totally eliminates the public prototype - we're tracking all in-house now privately.

Four hours, and the tool is ready to use. Now come the reports - which for management is where it's all at.

Thanks, Stay Warm!  (Isn't Spring supposed to be here?)

This is about Alexandria.  Not ready for prime time, but man, we need this bad.

The presentation is about silverlight business applications.  Some of the things that are demonstrated for today include WCF service creation, Entity framework data tier.  Then we get into the future of business application development with Silverlight.  

How about a Business Logic Class for ADO.Net Entity added - this gives the Silverlight application access to the data from the data layer.  Magic?  You can just add a reference and all is available to you in your silverlight application.  

I just spent the weekend working through communication issues including serialization and syncronizing business objects between a Silverlight application and the Web server app.  It seems to me that if I had access to production quality code such as this Alexandria project that I could have spent my weekend building out functionality that the user would actually SEE.

So why the heck am I messing around with all the code gen and all the compression and crap I'm doing for the EZBERP app..........!   Best answer I have is that this code isn't here, and I am.  I need my app now.

Two other pieces of Silverlight functionality that were shown which I have spent time on.  

• 1. How to handle the need for multiple pages in your silverlight application?  They've baked a concept involving a frame control.  Frames for multiple page applications?  These frames shown in the demo support BACKBUTTON NATIVELY.  

HERE I go again, I just spent all that energy on these very same problems.  My stuff works, but heck!  Time is more precious than gold.

• Login too, the login is right there.

I'll keep working on my stuff because I have no choice - but at least knowing about these pieces will enable me to plan for their eventual incorporation into my project - which will probably change the way I structure things.

I don't know.