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My first ‘real’ program. Written in VB6 in 2005. It connected to a state message switch using dmpp2020 protocol. It function was to run drivers license numbers and return a photo for Police Officers. It had two components- a back end that connected to the state and a web based front end. They were connected through a sql server. The front end wrote a request to a table and the back end monitored that table. The response from the state was then returned into another table. It was used by a couple of agencies including our 911 center. This was necessary as binary objects were a new thing at the time and neither our CAD or RMS system could do anything except plain text. So the subject of this - do you ever go back and admire your code - in this case I go back and wonder how it ever managed to function lol. Seriously. In reality though my admiration was in how rock solid it was. It’s last use :( was in 2017 so it was in service for 12 years and during that time it crashed literally never. I can’t say the same for the our other interfaces to the same message switch. So thanks HN for the opportunity to remember that!



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