Wildflower

Wildflower was developed for Wilmslow and Alderley Edge Horticultural Society in 2002. The systems helps to manage te show recording the entrants, producing labels for each of the entires, recording the winners totalling prize money and producing a press report. The society has successfully used Wildflower for the 2002 and 2003 shows.

I was never really Happy with Wildflower, it was made too quickly which resulted in many quirks which were very specific to the Wilmslow Show.

While Visual Basic is good for quickly producing systems to run on controlled environment when trying to distribute software produced using Visual Basic all sort of weird and wonderful errors start to surface, problems with libraries problems timing issues causing errors and many more. For the next generation of Wildflower I have decided a full rewrite using a compiled language would be beneficial.

One great benefit I would like to bring to Wildflower is XML support. XML cna be used to store and more importantly display information, I could therefore dispense with Crystal Reports (which I found to be overkill for Wildflower. XML ans XSLT stylesheets would allow me to present the reports in a visually pleasing way effectively simply using the transformation of the xml. This alone should mean Wildflower would be able to produce better reports more quickly and with more choice for the user.