Promissor ran a testing business with test many centers around the United States . These tests were for nursing, medical, law, education and many other certifications.

Promissor hired me to take control of the legacy testing software from another vendor who didn’t want to let it go. I was to travel to the vendor in Chicago and Evanston Illinois to get the code and any information that I could tactfully get out of them, make the code compile on my computer, reverse engineer the code and get it totally under the control of Promissor to remove the vendor from the equation. This code was developed with Visual C++, MFC, T-SQL and SQL Server.

At the same time development was going on to redesign the system in C#, ASP.Net, .Net and COM+. As all the data tier was completed first, Promissor wanted the legacy system that I took control of to interface with the COM+ components. There were several problems with this. The legacy system was not designed with a separate data tier. The vendor was asked if they could change the code but they quoted 1 million dollars.

When Promissor told me this, I told them of a solution that I could implement myself saving them 1 million dollars and only costing them my salary which they were paying me anyway. They didn’t believe me but I told them that I would use the adapter pattern and proceeded to successfully implement it in the next few months. I saved Promissor 1 million dollars by providing them a simpler solution that another vendor wanted to charge them 1 million dollars to complete.

The way I implemented this is that I created a stub SQL Server database schema that had all of the same stored procedures and returned all of the same result sets. Then I had the stored procedures call the COM+ services and pack up the data in the same result set. The client software would not be affected at all.

The system I was working on was the legacy system and then the adapter to the COM+. I did not stay on to move to the .Net version as the company was a long commute and they were overstaffed on that side of the development. In the end I was offered to volunteer to leave with a few month severance which I gladly accepted.

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