A long time ago, I had the idea of writing a series of posts about the issues
related to the migration of Point Of Sale applications developed in VB6.
(http://blogs.artinsoft.net/Mrojas/archive/2007/05/07/Migration-of-VB6-POS.aspx)
A lot of companies developed this kind of software in VB6, and they faced a lot of
of similar issues specially when dealing with POS devices.
It's nice that the industry has made the effort of developing standards as the UPOS or
Unified POS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnifiedPOS) and Microsoft also did a great work
by providing the COM and .NET implementations.
It was nice to move VB6 applications to POS for .NET, but times have change and so
has the UPOS grown to interesting proposals like WS-POS.
"The fundamental benefit of WS-POS is the ability to provision POS peripherals as
services that can be accessed by remote POS applications, including mobile POS
solutions. Retailers can then use the power of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
to allow access to their existing peripherals anywhere in the store through these
services. WS-POS holds potential benefits for all members of the retail ecosystem." from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-pos-retail/index.html
So you can now think about leveraring your VB6 POS to Silverlight or HTML5 and
consume WS-POS services to provide for example tablet-based implementations.
Imagine your POS application running in Silverlight or WinFX on a Windows 8 Tablet
or in HTML5 in iPads or Androids. Does it sound appealing? Well that is exactly the
kind of experience that our migration solution brings to the table.
You can download a working implementation of WS-POS from the Association for Retail
Technology Standards (ARTS) web site.
Go to http://www.nrf-arts.org/arts_download/schema-non-member
Download the UnifiedPOS 1.13 pdfs and reference implementation from the
WS-POS Addendum link (http://www.nrf-arts.org/download/file?f=http://www.nrf.com/Attachments.asp?id=30476&rid=227810) There are Java and WCF implementations. It is also very easy to modify the WCF
implementation so it can receive and respond JSON and work with your HTML5 implementations.
I always appreciate feedback, so if you have any more toughts or questions about HTML5 or Windows 8 POS implementations just let me know.
What is the ROT?
“Using ROT (Running Object Table) is a great way to establish interprocess communication between two windows applications. From a purely logical aspect, one application registers a pointer to an instance of a class in the ROT, the other one gets a pointer pointing to the same instance of the registered class and therefore can use the same instance of the class via this pointer. The class that is registered has to be a COM class, otherwise it can be written in any language. The application that will retrieve the pointer from the ROT can be written in any language that can use COM, as ROT gives a pointer to a COM interface.”
Can it be implemented in .NET?
Sure a .NET application can be exposed thru COM and then its pointer can be gotten and consumed by other applications querying the ROT.
And excelent example can be found here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/COM/ROTStuff.aspx
As always it has its caveats. Be careful.
Obvious replacement?
Well if what you want is (Interprocess Communication) IPC,there are several options in .NET :
* Classical .NET remoting which is very simple and stable to
* Named Pipes see an example here http://bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/archive/2007/04/12/getting-started-with-named-pipes.aspx
* or WCF with Named Pipes, an example here http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WCF/WCF_CommOptions_part1.aspx
WCF can be an interesting option specially if we were doing things like DCOM and Remote monikers.
WheWhen you are doing an azure migration, one of the first thing you must do is
collect all the information you can about your database.
Also at some point in your migration process you might consider between migration to
SQL Azure or Azure Storage or Azure Tables.
Do do all the appropriate decisions you need to collect at least basic data like:
- Database Size
- Table Size
- Row Size
- User Defined Types or any other code that depends on the CLR
- Extended Properties
Database Size
You can use a script like this to collect some general information:
create table #spaceused(
databasename varchar(255),
size varchar(255),
owner varchar(255),
dbid int,
created varchar(255),
status varchar(255),
level int)
insert #spaceused (databasename , size,owner,dbid,created,status, level) exec sp_helpdb
select * from #spaceused for xml raw
drop table #spaceused
When you run this script you will get an XML like:
<row databasename="master"
size=" 33.69 MB"
owner="sa"
dbid="1"
created="Apr 8 2003"
status="Status=ONLINE, ..."
level="90"/>
<row databasename="msdb"
size=" 50.50 MB"
owner="sa"
dbid="4"
created="Oct 14 2005"
status="Status=ONLINE, ..."
level="90"/>
<row databasename="mycooldb"
size=" 180.94 MB"
owner="sa"
dbid="89"
created="Apr 22 2010"
status="Status=ONLINE, ..."
level="90"/>
<row databasename="cooldb"
size=" 10.49 MB"
owner="sa"
dbid="53"
created="Jul 22 2010"
status="Status=ONLINE, ..."
level="90"/>
<row databasename="tempdb"
size=" 398.44 MB"
owner="sa" dbid="2"
created="Feb 16 2011"
status="Status=ONLINE, ..."
level="90"/>
And yes I know there are several other scripts that can give you more detailed information about your database
but this one answers simple questions like
Does my database fits in SQL Azure?
Which is an appropriate SQL Azure DB Size?
Also remember that SQL Azure is based on SQL Server 2008 (level 100).
80 = SQL Server 2000
90 = SQL Server 2005
100 = SQL Server 2008
If you are migrating from an older database (level 80 or 90) it might be necessary to upgrade first.
This post might be helpful: http://blog.scalabilityexperts.com/2008/01/28/upgrade-sql-server-2000-to-2005-or-2008/
Table Size
Table size is also important.There great script for that:
http://vyaskn.tripod.com/sp_show_biggest_tables.htm
If you plan to migrate to Azure Storage there are certain constraints. For example consider looking at the number of columns:
You can use these scripts: http://www.novicksoftware.com/udfofweek/vol2/t-sql-udf-vol-2-num-27-udf_tbl_colcounttab.htm (I just had to change the alter for create)
Row Size
I found this on a forum (thanks to Lee Dice and Michael Lee)
DECLARE @sql VARCHAR (8000)
, @tablename VARCHAR (255)
, @delim VARCHAR (3)
, @q CHAR (1)
SELECT @tablename = '{table name}'
, @q = CHAR (39)
SELECT @delim = ''
, @sql = 'SELECT '
SELECT @sql = @sql
+ @delim
+ 'ISNULL(DATALENGTH ([' + name + ']),0)'
, @delim = ' + '
FROM syscolumns
WHERE id = OBJECT_ID (@tablename)
ORDER BY colid
SELECT @sql = @sql + ' rowlength'
+ ' FROM [' + @tablename + ']'
, @sql = 'SELECT MAX (rowlength)'
+ ' FROM (' + @sql + ') rowlengths'
PRINT @sql
EXEC (@sql)
Remember to change the {table name} for the name of the table you need
User Defined Types or any other code that depends on the CLR
Just look at your db scripts at determine if there are any CREATE TYPE statements with the assembly keyword.
Also determine if CLR is enabled with a query like:
select * from sys.configurations where name = 'clr enabled'
If this query has a column value = 1 then it is enabled.
Extended Properties
Look for calls to sp_addextendedproperty dropextendedproperty OBJECTPROPERTY and sys.extended_properties in your scripts.