Software Integration | Website Development & Design

Interlock ASP consultants turn your ideas into reality on time and on budget every time! We work with key people within your organization to learn their unique business approach and apply our experience and technical expertise to provide the optimum technical solution for your business needs. Interlock ASP consultants will work with your company to help you determine exactly what you need, then come up with a plan to achieve it within your time and budget requirements.
Software development is a complex process, but we are experts at getting these types of projects completed and implemented quickly. You control the process but can count on us to get it done. Our software integration solutions often led to significant business benefits in terms of cost efficiencies and competitive advantage, including increased speed-to-market.

Interlock ASP Inc. has an excellent software applications development team that design and develop custom applications using latest technologies: Visual Basic, SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Oracle, Crystal Reports. With many years experience our team provides effective consulting services to fortune 500 corporations. Our services can be provided on a fixed price basis or on an hourly basis.

Applications can be created using Visual Basic and SQL Server, Visual Basic and Access, or Access alone. Custom reports done in Crystal Reports can be seamlessly integrated into a Visual Basic application. New databases can be designed and created in SQL Server or Access, or new programming can be done in Visual Basic to work with existing SQL Server, Access, or ODBC / OLEDB / ADO compatible databases.

Visual Basic
Developing an application in Microsoft Visual Basic can result in a fast-performing application that is tailored to the specific look and feel. Visual Basic's flexibility lends itself to development of applications ranging from large multi-user systems and distributed applications down to single-user applications and small utility programs.

Microsoft Access
Developing an application in Microsoft Access has a number of advantages. It is generally less expensive to develop an application in Access as compared to Visual Basic, because the development time is usually much shorter. An Access application can be modified much more quickly as well. If the Access database outgrow later on, then data can be converted to a SQL Server or Oracle database without much trouble.

Of course, there are limitations to what can be done in Access. It may be that the needs of your application would be better served by programming in Visual Basic. After we discuss your particular needs, then we'll be in a better position to pick the right tool for the job.

Using Visual Basic in a 3-tier client/server application design
Visual Basic can be used to create presentation layer, business layer, and data layer components in a 3-tier design. The business and data middle tier components sit "between" the client programs and the database server. Requests for data from the client programs are passed to the middle tier components which retrieve the data and pass the results back to the client programs.

One advantage of this approach is that database resources are conserved. It is as though the database server "sees" fewer users out there than there really are, since the middle tier "pools" connections to the database. Another advantage of this type of design is scalability. As the number of users on your system grows, performance can be improved by distributing this load across additional "middle tier" machines (without the need for programming changes), thereby reducing the need for additional database servers.
Using Visual Basic custom programming to connect your computer with special purpose devices

Custom programming can be done with Visual Basic to interface various devices through your PC's serial communications port. These could be devices such as bar code readers, digitizers, optical mark readers, time clocks, or any other special purpose device capable of communication through an RS232 port.

If you are in need of creating an application capable of communicating with such devices, Visual Basic can be used either to create the complete application, or VB might be used only to create the portion that handles the communication. Because of Visual Basic's ability to create ActiveX .DLLs, the complexities of communicating with a device can be "wrapped" in a COM object that then exposes properties and methods for communicating with the device in a simpler way. You can then use the COM object with any other programming language that supports the COM interface.

Extend the power of Crystal Reports with Visual Basic
Visual Basic can be used to extend the power of Crystal Reports through the use of user-defined functions. Using VB, programming can be done to create additional functions in a .DLL that Crystal Reports will recognize. These custom functions then appear right along with the list of built-in functions when designing formulas in the Crystal Reports Designer.
One example of where this can be of benefit might be in creating functions to manipulate a special fiscal calendar that your company uses. Creation of functions such as these might mean that "power-user" employees familiar with Crystal Reports will be able to produce many more reports on their own with the aid of such functions, instead of having to pass those reports on to programming staff or outside consultants due to the complexity of calculations, etc.