Week 1: This week I received my project assignment.  It is to create a web-based system that tracks graduates of St. Norbert
College so that information about them may be at the utilization of others.  This information includes descriptions of jobs after
college, possibly the track to finding that job, and general information on the graduate such as contact information.  This project was started by a CS student at St. Norbert two years ago but never completed.  The project leads that will primarily be instructing and assisting me for this project are Professor Molnar and Professor McVey.

Week 2: I met with Professor Molnar early this week.  After talking with her, it is clear that she will be taking lead of the system development aspect of the project. For the next time I meet with her I will create an official system proposal, which will outline the structure of the system, its purpose, strengths, weaknesses, and basic development procedures.

I also met with Professor McVey this week.  She has more insight on what the system's purpose shall be and how it will be
implemented and maintained.  After the meeting I left her office with some helpful looking books on web-based system
development and an introduction to .Net, which is most likely the platform I will use to create the application.  These books will greatly help me in determining how to begin creating the design and coding of the system, and how to understand the code that was left behind by the project two years ago.

Week 3: I finished my information service request and initial draft of my system proposal.  They were approved by the project leads and are both viewable on my resources page.  I also created an I/R diagram for the database and have created the database according to the diagram.  I will work on posting a formal version of the diagram and adding sample data to the database next week, as well as building a visual demonstration of the application and its framework.  The next step will then be creating communications between the app and the DB so that I can test a local demo of the finished product.

Week 4: I have started working on the visual demo of the application.  I showed the first version of the main window to Dr. Pankratz and am going to revise it to initially show a listview of students instead of initially offering search fields and then showing a listview.  The search will be offered as a secondary function.  I revised the database slightly and took a screenshot of the relationships of its tables, which is now available on the resources page.  More to come soon...

Week 5: This week I dove head-on into creating the fundamental modules of my application.  I put test data into the database and was able to pull it from the database using my app into a listbox on the main screen.  This listbox shows multiple alumni profiles in general form, and each is clickable to open that specific alumnus profile.  Next, from the specific profile, there will be a link to edit that profile, which all users may click on but a verification will pop up asking something that will verify that the user has permission to edit that profile (so that it either must be the user who owns the profile or an administrator).  The only thing I really have yet to decide on as far as flow of the program is how the admin will initially input data.  This will most likely be a problem that I will tackle early next week.  Aside from that, I have screenshots available of all of these windows on the resources page.

Week 7: I should have a local demo at this point (according to my timeline) but it is not quite finished.  I have more time in my schedule, however, seeing as the application will not be going online since it is being developed in VB.  In the future, my finished app will be ported to .NET or a similar language that is compatible with the CompSci server.  However, this doesn't mean I should spend too much time finishing my project.  The demo, as of now, has functionality for viewing general profiles and completing basic searches.  I still have to figure out how to add in verifications to edit information.

Week 9: The week after spring break was kind of rough.  I thought I'd be able to stick around campus for a day or two so that I'd be able to get some good coding work done, but the lab closed pretty early on Friday.  This week I just got some work done on the education and career history modules so that one is able to view the information in the "career" and "furthereducation" tables.

Week 10: It was easier to get more work done this week once classes got rolling again.  All of the code for viewing DB information is now done.  I began finalizing a window for adding alumni to the database, and I also am working on windows that alumni will be able to edit their information with.  These windows will be the same type of windows as when people are viewing the information, except the fields will be active and some texts will be invisible.  

Week 12: I polished up my search algorithm so hopefully multiple fields can be searched on accurately.  It was a hard process to translate into code, and hopefully later I can polish it more so that it returns records with 100% accuracy.  Aside from the search being near completion, I now have entered password fields into the DB and have had to create more temp tables into the DB than originally planned.  I realized that alumni will have to sometimes enter companies and schools that aren't initially in the DB, so temp tables for those types of things must be created... the next step will be adding some kind of verification of all of these temp objects by the system administrator.

Week 13: I decided to add in lots of nice tools for the administrator.  I worked many hours adding a new window that will, once the admin signs in, show how many updates were made to each temp table.  The admin then is able to verify each update in an order that will keep data integrity through this new controls window.  This idea will offer an alternative to the initial idea of notifying the admin of updates through e-mail.  It actually is a neat process, and I think the admin will find it to be very convenient.  I revised my search a bit so that it will work slightly better with multiple field searches.  I also added in functionality for editing passwords.  I decided to make include initials and birthdate into passwords because birthdates are more exclusive to individual people but faculty (admin) also have access to them, unlike soc. security numbers or other more private information.  Upon completion of all of this, my project is ready for presentation!