- Glorsoft’s Velocity toolkit is used directly in Visual Studio. As a development tool, Visual Studio is well established. Other IVR toolkits use a development environment which is specific to that toolkit, which unfortunately means that the powerful Visual Studio development and debugging techniques which are familiar to the programmer cannot be used. By using Visual Studio as its development environment, Velocity makes telephony programming easier. It also means for example that you can use Visual Studio team edition to have multiple developers work on one project, something which cannot be accomplished with other toolkits.
- Because Velocity can be used directly from .NET, you can use the huge range of .NET tools available to work in conjunction with your code. For example, Microsoft Sandcastle can be used to automatically generate help files directly from your source code comments, and Microsoft’s Software Licencing and Protection Service (SLPS) can be used to protect your code and to licence it. These tools / services cannot be used with a proprietary IVR language.
- Some .NET IVR toolkits are no more than old COM components with a .NET layer wrapped around them, which means you have to load an extra layer of old technology before you even start a single channel. Velocity is developed directly in .NET and speaks directly to the low level native API’s for the telephony devices. This means less overhead for the toolkit, leaving more resources for your application. It also means that because the IVR is developed from scratch in .NET, it is developed using the same technology the programmer will be using to write the application, so it will work seamlessly.
- Velocity supports the entire Dialogic Diva (V-Series) family of voice boards as well as Diva Soft-IP. It also supports classic Dialogic boards such as the D4PCI, D300JCT, DMV600/1200BTEP boards and Dialogic’s Host Media Processing software. These boards can all be used at the same time from within the same application, a unique feature of Velocity.
- Velocity does not need to be run on a form. Some IVR toolkits use form based ActiveX controls. Unfortunately, if your application is a console application or a service, this can pose difficulties.
- Velocity takes the worries of multithreading and asynchronous programming away from the programmer. The programmer can program as usual without having to worry about threads, semaphores, queues, critical code sections etc. And because the front end API is synchronous, the developer is shielded from the complicated asynchronous nature of telecoms programming.
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