Other Blue Ink Benefits

In addition to its primary benefit of time savings, Blue Ink provides a wealth of senior developer expertise, provides code standardization, and reduces the cost of last minute requirements changes.

Senior Developer Expertise

The default templates provided with Blue Ink bring the author's numerous years of .Net experience directly to your project.  In the past integrating best practices into applications has required knowledge and expertise that only a senior developer can bring.  The author has spent a significant amount of time researching and integrating best practices, such as .Net's declarative security which requires numerous steps to implement correctly, into Blue Ink.  The result is that projects which use Blue Ink will require less expertise, and will deliver a product of superior quality, every time.

Code Standardization

Those familiar with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) understand the importance of standardization. Code generated by Blue Ink is necessarily standardized and this produces several benefits. From a project management perspective the application's standardization increases a project’s standardization - which in turn increases the predictability, effectiveness and control of a project.

From a maintenance perspective an application generated with Blue Ink is easier to update because code is located in predictable places. From a developer’s perspective code standardization increases ramp-up time for placing a new developer to a project as code can be duplicated from existing places and modified rather than "figuring it out as you go." Furthermore a developer that is familiar with a particular template can be placed on any project that uses the same or a similar template and have an intimate knowledge of how the project works.

Data Model Changes

Changing a data model incurs significant time delays in a project, as code at all levels must be reviewed, changed, and tested for each database table that changes.

Blue Ink helps significantly reduce the cost of data model changes because Blue Ink is designed with re-generation of code in mind. The default .Net templates are designed to combine the power of object oriented design with code generation to allow:

1. Blue Ink to generate the code for an entity (e.g. a Customer table)
2. A developer to potentially customize the code (e.g. writing the code to calculate and update the YTD Revenue field upon entity modification)
3. A database administrator to modify that entity (e.g. add a Driving Directions field)
4. Blue Ink to re-generate the code for the entity and
   1. Include the database administrator’s changes in the application (e.g. have the Driving Directions field appear in the add, update, and view detail pages and be fully functional)
   2. Keep the developer’s original customizations (e.g. the YDT calculation still works)

This process should eliminate the minimum 5% cost of data model changes and show a 10% savings in the time spent implementing changes.