Logicalis and Washington Dep of Licensing visits XML Team

It was great to have Logicalis up to Building 35 Friday (1/21/05) to talk to the XML team about the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System Project that they have been working in conjunction with the Washington State Department of Licensing.  Thanks to Dan Remy (yup, my brother), Corey Snow, Bill Baxter, and Mike O'Shea from Logicalis as well as Linda Rae, Jeff Crose and Holly Burch from Washington State Department of Licensing. Dan described the architecture of the system highlighting the big technical challenges that were overcome by use of System.Xml functionality. Corey showed some signifcant XSLT work that he had done on the system (with lots of comments about looking forward to the XSLT debugger in Whidbey). Mike then showed us a graphing component that made significant use of XML technologies. It was an impressive system and it was great for the XML team to get a chance to learn about how XML technologies are getting used, what the underlying motivations resulting in XML usage, and some interesting ideas on how we can do better. Thanks very much Dan, Corey, Jeff, Bill, Mike, Linda, and Holly. We wish you all the success in the world and would like to keep in regular touch with you to get feedback.

BTW, we are always looking for real world XML customer scenarios so if you are a customer using .NET System.XML technology (or MSXML) extensively or perhaps a consultant with a customer that is we would love to talk with you. Perhaps you would be interested in giving a talk to the MS XML Team like Logicalis did. 

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Here is the announcement I sent out to the XML team about the Logicalis talk ....

from Logicalis will share with us information about their successful .NET based National Motor Vehicle Title Information System (NMVTIS) . It features use of System.XML as well as use of native XSLT amongst other technologies.
from Logicalis will also present a charting tool that can be used on the web or in Windows Forms written using C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, XSLT, XPath, XML, and JScript.
 

Logicalis is international company based out of London, England. Specializing in the following areas:

From their website

: Logicalis Group has over 5,000 customers including many of the world’s leading companies and a large number of public sector organisations. We employ over a thousand employees dedicated to delivering high-performance, cost-efficient and robust IT infrastructures to enable our customers’ critical business applications to run effectively
 

This is the State of Washington Department of Licensing's effort to participate in the federal NMVTIS program. The national NMVTIS system tracks Vehicle Title and Brand information across states to help detect fraudulent activities. NMVTIS also provides a ability to perform theft inquiries to check for stolen vehicles.

The NMVTIS interface requires states to generate and interpret transactions in variety of formats. One of our challenges was to simply this interface for state application use. Using XML, we managed to completely abstract the federal formats from the state applications.

We built an NMVTIS Help Desk application using ASP.net & VB.net that allows the operator to submit any NMVTIS transaction request online to the national system. All requests go through a web service that uses XML schemas for validating the request XML format. Additionally, we used some elaborate XSLT to dynamically format and display any response returned from an NMVTIS requests. It turned out great!

 
- Managing Consultant, Lead Technician and Architect on the NMVTIS project. Specializes is leading the business team through requirements and design; and then leading the technical team through construction and implementation (primarily Microsoft technologies).

Corey Snow

- Senior Consultant. Specializes in security and .Net technologies... he is the mastermind behind the NMVTIS Response display processing. Excellent with XML core technologies.