A typical college project will involve developing an application for a particular domain such as HR, Accounting, Library Management, Lab Management and Canteen Management. The user interface, the reporting system, alerts, queries, spot printing will be custonmized to the requirements of each project. The process for executing such projects will involve the following steps.
Domain Study
The first step in developing a software is to study the domain. If you are
developing the software for an accounting domain, you need to study the transactions which occur in a accounting system. The transactions in an accounting system can be payments, receipts, vouchers, journals etc. While studying the domain, you should understans the implecations and consequences of each transaction and also when each of the transaction is raised. You should also understand the impact of these transactions on the reporting data. Insufficient understanding can lead to problems while executing the
project.
Requirements Analysis
The next step is to determine the scope of the project. A clear understanding should be reached for determining the features and coverage of the software being developed. This should be in a written form and this document is also referred to as scope document.
Specification
This step involves a rigorous understanding of all the features and options being provided in the software project. At this stage, it will be useful if the specifications or cross checked by a third party. This will ensure that the requirements of the software project and the festures and solution being developed are same.
Development
In this step, the software programs are developed.
Testing
Testing is an important step and is nowadays integrated into the development process.
Deployment
In this step, the software solution is deployed and training is provided for the end user.
Documentation
After the deployment is complete, a final documentation is prepared based on the documentation done during each of the above step.
The steps involved in executing each project will remain same. Next, the student executing the project should be familiar with the following techniques of programming.
Guidelines to develop a Visual Basic, Asp.net, Sql Server Project
Using appropriate/ suitable controls in a data entry form
If you are developing a windows application you can use rich controls on the windows forms more often. If you are developing web applications, you should carefully use rich controls on the web forms. The reason is, if you use more rich controls on a web form, the time taken to dispaly the web page will be longer. This longer duration is due to the ViewState feature implemented in Asp.net controls and the associated postbacks.
Validations to be performed before saving
For windows application or web application, validating data is to be done before saving the data into the database. To perform validations in a web application, you can use validation controls provided by ASP.Net controls. Asp.net controls are very sophisticated and we can implement any kind of validations.
To perform validations in a windows applications, we need to trap the events raised by each control and write code to validate the input.
Data access
For both windows and web applications, we use the same technology that is ADO.net. In a web application, to display data in a Asp.net page, you can use DataReader object more often because data access is speedier.
For windows applications, you can use Dataset object to achieve higher speeds as the data is stored locally.
Data saving routines
For both windows application and web application, you can use stored procedures and triggers for saving data. The procedure for calling stored procedure using the Command object is the same for both windows and web applications.
