Today I have the pleasure of announcing that Erik Udstuen has joined as a partner in SlimSoft. Erik has a history with the principals of SlimSoft through a number of successful business relationships stretching back almost 10 years. We are excited by the prospects his involvement will now bring to SlimSoft.

Many of you know Erik from his time building Mountain Systems. He was a pioneer in configurable MES solutions and has first-hand knowledge of developing and deploying software to a wide variety of industries and locales.

Equally important is the fact that Erik has been where we are and understands where we are going as a company. We, at SlimSoft, believe that surrounding ourselves with people having this kind of experience is critical to our success.

As we evolve our business from a pure services company to one that is also focused on software development, Erik's experience will help to guide our product vision and business strategy. This is the next important step in the continued growth of our company.

Welcome on board Erik. The vote of confidence will not go unrewarded!

Over the years I have developed many very complex reporting applications using SQL and Excel VBA. SQL was used to retrieve and analyze the data and Excel VBA was used to develop the presentation layer. This past year though there has been an increase demand for web based reports so we started looking for a Web Based Control that would give me the same flexibility of customization as VBA Excel. The object that made the grade for us was Spread for Web Forms developed by Far Point Technologies. It is a web based grid completely customizable to the cell level just like Excel. By using Spread for Web Forms I was able to keep the complex SQL stored procedure code that I had written to import the data into Excel and I was able to re-write the Excel VBA using Spread to reproduce the presentation layer. Considering that the development effort is about 80% for the stored procedure and 20% for the presentation layer, by using Spread we were able to preserve 80% of the work.

Spread supports both VB.Net and C#, works in both Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 and is relatively easy to use. After about a week going through the developers guide and code examples I was able to start coding my first project. For more complex problems that were not covered by the developers guide I found the Far Point forum extremely helpful. On the forum you can post questions, send code examples etc. and within a couple of hours you have an answer from the Far Point support staff. Their relatively quick response time to questions and their great supply of code examples allowed me to keep a good pace of development even when I was a relative rookie at developing web based reports.

If you are looking at re-developing your Excel reports in the .NET environment, I strongly recommend you check out Spread for Web Forms.