Richard Rozsa

At SPS/Gensys, a major new release of one of their new products was being prepared that dramatically altered both the product storage location as well as the schema. The upgrade tool to update the schema in data sources was integrated into the entity class code. This allowed programmers to make changes to the database and the upgrade tool would immediately support the new schema. Conversion was fully automated so development schedules never delayed testers and other pre-release users from being able to test incremental versions.

This .NET library integrates into applications and provides an interface for implementing classes that can read or write to virtually any data source/file format/API. Most commonly-used reader and writer classes are provided as a powerful mapping engine for converting from source to destination formats. A standalone configuration tool is also provided to quickly create mapping configurations.

The U.S. Department of Energy was tasked with quickly creating a plan for disposing all of the nuclear and hazardous waste that had been stored for decades. There was a requirement that the solution be implemented in Paradox. Together with another developer and a team of scientists, we developed a simple interface for selecting transport routes on a map and calculating health risks and total costs extremely quickly using an external calculation library developed in C++. The project had a dramatic effect as it demonstrated that the actual costs for disposal was billions of dollars cheaper than had previously been estimated. It was the first tool that could calculate the vast amount of data for potential plans quickly enough that real evaluation of plans could be considered and over-inflated thumb-in-the-air estimates could be discounted.

Setup a testing/performance lab for the Forms3 team at Microsoft (the forms library used in VBA and IE3). Using both existing and new tools, the lab could run through a large volume of tests using multiple machines with a clean OS between runs, returning complete reports and highlighting changes between runs, cutting down analysis time. Note that this was before the days of virtualization. In combination with the automated build system, every developer's version control submission was validated and nightly performance runs ensured no regressions were introduced.

Designed Flash page-turning component for dynamic content. Component requests page content in the form of an XML document containing content and formatting from the server. In this way, the "book" has completely dynamic content and can grow and change immediately as new content is added. The hosting website allows users to add content through MVC web forms.

Developed a version control system at Borland, Microsoft, and for several smaller contracts. The system was a generic shell over replaceable low-level version control products. The system allowed users to work without checking out files (allowing them to work disconnected), kept track of files and versions each developer had retrieved, and checked in files, automatically merging with any newer versions. Check-ins would join a queue where a build/test machine would verify each submission, only adding to the branch tip in version control when successful. Teams could view the queue/build/test progress remotely. Merge/build/test failures were also stored remotely, allowing developers to resubmit fixes. In this way, the branch tip in version control was always guaranteed to be stable and developers were never blocked by another developer's broken code. While other teams suffered regularly from broken builds, users of this tool could submit frequently and were guaranteed a stable baseline.

The Covast EDI Accelerator for BizTalk Server allowed BizTalk Server to process EDI and EDIFACT documents. Early versions of this product missed critical integration possibilities in the BizTalk tools. A design was made to dynamically add menu items and buttons to the BizTalk designer. This was a complex product in that through one user interface, it updated the Covast database as well as the BizTalk storage. A framework was implemented for form creation that created dialogs, added data entry and label widgets, performed validation on user input, and stored to the Covast database.