Over the past year, I have posted a few tidbits from the project I am currently working on, including a teaser before I went on vacation that I would reveal what it was soon.

Well, that time has come! I have been working with National City Mortgage on NationalCityHomeLoans.com, an ASP.NET-based mortgage website that is much more than just a lead generator. Internally, we dubbed it the Virtual Loan Officer. It's meant to handle transactions from the very beginning stages (how much can I afford? What are my refinancing options? How much money can I get out of my house? Etc.) to taking your application and keeping you updated of it's status throughout the whole process. There's a better description in the Great Lake IT Report.

It's been one of the best projects I have ever worked on. My role was lead developer. Brian was the architect and visionary. He helped National City Mortgage shape their vision, and then he and I worked together to figure out how to implement it. At times, we had upwards of 10 developers on the project as well as QA and design resources.

Let's start with some quick stats about the finished product. There's over 440,000 lines of code and over 2,500 different types. That's spread over 7 projects. The bulk of our code is in our shared library, dubbed the common business library (CBL).

The project itself provided a lot of challenges. National City already had an existing application that their call center used to take applications. Our job was to integrate with it, so that customers could seamlessly work on the web or with a loan officer over the phone. That proved to be challenging, but exciting. The process started Last May, when we started the process of revamping their internal application - new database design, a shared business library, shared data layer, UI, etc. Once that was done, we started the process of designing the pricing engine that could handle all of the different guidelines set forth by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. If you've ever had to deal with guidelines, you know what I mean - there are some crazy ones, and a lot of them. We take into account most of them at this point, and the system is set up to be able to add the others easily. Then we started the process of integrating in existing customer's loan data. That means if you have a loan with NCM, we can give you accurate information about your loan so when you want to refinance your loan or get equity out of it, the site already knows your information, so it can get you a quote faster.

There's a ton of other features, and I'm hoping to write a few follow-up posts about some of the challenges we faced, and how we solved them, but for now, I wanted to post this. In the mean time, if you have questions, let me know! I'll answer them if I can. If you're a NuSoft employee, I'm supposed to be giving a presentation on it next Wednesday to the development team.