GIS for the Royal Dutch Army's staff information system
Geographic display of the field situation (maps, positions, troop coordinates) for the next generation of ISIS, the Royal Dutch Army's Integrated Staff Information System for officers at base sites.
- Client
- C2SC, Royal Dutch Army
- Period
- Jun 2009 – Jan 2013
- Sector
- Defence · GIS
- Role
- Software Engineer, Architectural design, Testing, Backup team lead, Contractor through Luminis
The C2SC develops and maintains the information and communication software of the Dutch land forces. I worked in the team behind ISIS, the Integrated Staff Information System that officers use to see what is happening in the field and what happened before.
The team maintained the operational version, at the time in use in Afghanistan, while building the next generation in .NET 3.5. Most of my work was on the geographic information side: WPF components that display maps, positions and troop coordinates. Alongside that I built a service framework for data abstraction: different data sources (file, internet, real-time) could be used without changing the UI. Component-based development and dependency injection were central to that design.
I was backup team lead in a team of six developers, an architect and a team leader.
Key challenges
- Maintaining the operational version in use in the field while building its successor.
- Data from very different sources (files, internet and real-time feeds) had to reach the same UI.
- Replacing Visual Basic components without disrupting a mission-critical system.
Architecture highlights
- A service framework for data abstraction, so file, internet and real-time sources plug in without UI changes.
- Component-based development with dependency injection throughout.
- WPF GIS components for maps, positions and troop coordinates.
Stack
- C#
- .NET 3.5
- WPF
- GIS
- LINQ
- Dependency injection
- UML
- Unit testing
- Git
