1. ACPA Pipe School January 6, 2017 Brian Barngrover and Becca Alford
PipeCar
ACPA Pipe School
January 6, 2017
Brian Barngrover and Becca Alford

2. Agenda How did we get here? What have we done? Where are we going?
Rigid Rugged Resilient

3. How did we get here?

4. First developed in 1989 Rigid Rugged Resilient
Combination of SGH, FWHA, and ACPA
Rigid Rugged Resilient

5. Fortran on DOS platform
Very linear as was the custom for DOS programs, this is not a knock, we all basically had to program DOS in this manner, event driven architecture was difficult to do in DOS, unless you purchased an expensive platform that sat on top of DOS, and then we got Windows, which was originally a relatively inexpensive platform that set on top of DOS
Rigid Rugged Resilient

6. Introduction of Windows Platform
Big differences, more graphical, event driven, program was converted to VB for Windows (which is what I refer to as VB6), worked well for earlier versions of Windows (XP, for example), I have a computer at my office that is XP so I can work on VB6 programs for long time clients, unfortunately VB6 is no longer updated or supported by Microsoft, and as a results of that users were having trouble using PipeCar on modern operating systems, plus it is tough to find VB6 programmers, why the change?
Rigid Rugged Resilient

7. Internet Revolution
Now we have the Internet, this necessitated a new paradigm for software development, Microsoft introduced .NET platform, program development is much more complex today (glorified text editor for DOS to a complex development environment in .NET), also the interface is much larger part of programming than before (use example of percentages of interface design vs. engineering algorithms), so that’s when we came to an agreement with ACPA to take over PipeCar development
Rigid Rugged Resilient

8. What have we done?

9. Changed name to Eriksson Pipe
Rigid Rugged Resilient

10. Changed name to Eriksson Pipe
And that’s it
Rigid Rugged Resilient

11. Changed name to Eriksson Pipe
And that’s it
(just kidding)
Rigid Rugged Resilient

12. Converted to VB.NET Rigid Rugged Resilient
Brought code base forward to latest development environment (.NET), did not convert to C# (really no need to, as all .NET compliant languages are very similar)
Rigid Rugged Resilient

13. Modernized the interface
Allow both linear and event driven approach (will show in our live demo), but kept the familiar PipeCar dialog boxes, similar to ETCulvert, generation 2 of our interface paradigm, remember that interface design is a very large part of a Windows program, we are trying to reduce that, our current approach in Eriksson Culvert is generation 3, and we are already working on generation 4, where we are combining the text report and input (eliminating dialog boxes – actually did that in generation 3, reducing the learning curve – only one interface to learn instead of 2)
Rigid Rugged Resilient

14. Expanded the documentation
Updated user manual and help file, added QC manual, discuss QC problems (both published and unpublished) and how we run all of them before every release
Rigid Rugged Resilient

15. Fixed lingering problems
Some of these problems have been around for years (none of them were serious), we take calculation errors very seriously and we generally fix them within a week
Rigid Rugged Resilient

16. Added Features Rigid Rugged Resilient
Major ones were the support for 7th and ‘8th’ editions of LRFD, also have gone to subscription based (as has a lot of software these days), automated tech support option, we will cover other additions in our live demo
Rigid Rugged Resilient

17. Live Demo

18. Where are we going?

19. Future of Eriksson Pipe
Keep up with specification changes
CANDE replacement?
Pipe Jacking?
Internal pressure?
Future of Eriksson Software
Spring chicken story
Rigid Rugged Resilient

20. Requests?