Landscaping SaaS

I have worked for this client since June 2015.

The application consists of two parts, a desktop add-in to AutoCAD and Revit with an accompanying website to provide data related to end-clients’ planting layouts. Users are employees within world-wide architectural companies. They would install the desktop add-in which would connect to the website in order to download and add landscaping to their AutoCAD or Revit designs.

My involvement is related to the website. This handles product activation, organisation logins and enables the configuration of planting layouts. In addition, there are separate areas of the website for administrative functionality such as support, updating/approving new planting information and managing organisations along with their licences.

When I started working on this offering, there were three different websites using three different server-side programming languages. These were Classic ASP for internal administration, VB.NET for support and C# for the consumer facing website.

The consumer facing website is predominately Web Forms and makes heavy use of Telerik controls. Connections to the database often use the SqlConnection object to call one of many stored procedures or directly running a SQL command. Due to some of the website views being used within the desktop product (built using WinForms), it was not possible to easily change some of the technologies used. Consequently, much of this has not been altered as not to disrupt the end users experience.

One of my first tasks was to move the functionality of the Classic ASP and VB.NET into the main C# ASP.NET website. The main website still retains its Web Forms, while the support and administrative areas now use MVC. I have done the following to the consumer facing website:

  • Migrated the applications from .NET 2 to .NET 4.52
  • Enabled the toggling of plant units from metric to imperial on the fly
  • Facilitate the creation of custom plants for organisations
  • Standardise the characteristics of plants by setting up prescribed properties for shapes, ages, containers etc.
  • Created trial facility for the application which would dynamically create an account and email login details to the end user

In conjunction with this development, I also created a website enabling users to view NPS (National Planting Specification) plants. This site was built using jQuery calling a Web API. I also assist with the marketing website based on WordPress and MySQL.

As part of a separate BIM (Building Information Modelling) initiative from the client, I have also created an MVC website to facilitate the uploading of PDS (Product Data Specification) and PDT (Product Data Template) data.