January 30
This week I receieved my project, which will be a web-based database that will display inforamtion about SNC alumni and what they have been doing.
February 6
This week I began researching what platform would be best for this project. After doing some research I found that both Perl and .net would offer what in need to do the project. I have already done web based stuff in Perl, so I would feel more comfortable doing in Perl. However, .net would offer better event traping capabilities and graphics.
February 13
This week continued to research the different platforms to deside which platform would be best.
February 20
This week I meet with professor Pankratz and decided that I would be using Visual Studio .net for the project. I believe that Visual Studio .net will offer more capabities then Perl and will provide a learning experience. I also meet with Karl Riehl this week to get a better understanding of the software, sence Karl has had extensive work with it. He also had a ASP .net book which had hundreds of small examples programs which would exteremly helpful.
February 27
This week I started working on the design of the database. On Thuesday I meet with professor Pankratz, Blahnik and McVey to discuss the designs. During the meeting we discussed what information the project should cature and what addional information would be nice to cature. After the meeting I meet with professor Blahnik to go over some database design procedures. After the meeting and meeting with professor blahnik I had a much better understanding of what the project was going to be used for and what what information needed to be catured. Like suggested, from professor Blahnik, I began redesigning the database using just a pen and paper. I plan on meeting professor Blahnik again some time next week to go over the new designs.
March 6
This week I continued to work on the design of my database. On Thursday I recieved a copy of visual studio .net from professor McVey, which I installed on the computer that is going to be set up in PAC. Sense I will be using a database to hold the information about the alumni, I also had to install SQL server on the computer. The last step is to install ISS software so that I am able to set up a local server using windows XP. I was unable to obtain a copy of windows XP to install the software, however I plan on installing it on Monday.
March 13
I started to play with .Net this week. I wanted to start small so I tryed to create a small program that will open a connection with the database and be able to read and write to it. However, I had trouble connecting to the database.
March 18
This week I meet with fello classmate Karl Riehl, who showed me how to open a connection to the database and write to a tabel in it. This was a huge set because it allowed me to communicate with the databse from the .Net application. I was hopeing that I would be able to get a small program working that would both read and write to the database, but I was not able to get everything to working correctly.
March 25
This week I was able to get a small working program that is able to read and write to my database. This allows two-way commuication between the web page and the database. From here I want to start developing the user interfaces for the web application. I have already developed some of the user interfaces in Visual Studio 6.0, which i plan to model after. I would like to have some of my pages created and fully working by the end of the weekend.
April 1
This week I ran into my first really difficult problem. I was able to create the pages that used just text box's. However, I wanted to use dropdown box's on both the adding/editing jobs page and the adding/editing further education page. I ran into a problem getting the value that was selected, by the user, from the web page to the database. Each time I reference the dropdown box I was always getting the first value in the list, regardless of the value selected. I was not able to find the reason for this so I asked Karl if he know what I was doing wrong. Karl informed me that when an event, like a button click, the page refreshes it's self. So when the button is being pushed the page set the value for the dropdown box back to the first value of the list, which explained why I was always getting the same value. The problem was able to be fixed with a singal line of code. To do this, I needed to set the section of code to ! Page.IsPostBack. For example:
If Not Page.IsPostBack Then
Code
End If
This makes it so that the code is run only on the load of the page instead of whenever an event occurs. After adding the line of code I was able to successfully pull the selected value from the dropdown box and write it to the database. For the weekend I am hopeing to get the Add and Delete buttons working on all of my pages.
April 8
During the weekend I was able to get the Add and Delete buttons working on all of my web pages. During the week I was also able to get the Update button working as well. I also started to working on createing the list box's that would allow the user to see all of there already existing records for jobs and their further educational experiences. This would allow the user to click on a past record, in the list box, and all of the inforamtion for that record would be displayed for the user to edit the data. I hope to get the list box's fully working by the end of the weekend.
April 15
The major task of the week was getting the authenication tickets working so that I could block all un-autherized, people that haven't entered a valid username and password, from my web pages that should have securtity. To do this I needed to create a authenication ticket, which is a cookie, that would keep track of the user and grant them promission to access the alumni pages. I think I will be able to get this working by the end of the weekend.
April 22
I spent most of the cleaning up my code and making small changes to my code. I also added a feature that allows the public users to search the database for inforamtion like, How many St. Norbert alumni obtain a management postion after graduation? or How many St. Norbert alumni pursue further education after graduation? This would allow high school seniors to be able to get a understanding of what St. Norbert College students do after graduation.