tools «

Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 (.NET)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/

This is Microsofts development environment. This was used to create the standalone component of our project. We started out using this for the web component, however we found that the code it produced wasn't very clean or portable.

C#

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/

We used this for most programming tasks in both the standalone and web components. Both Visual Studio and ASP.NET support C#.

ASP .NET

http://www.asp.net/

We used this for the web component. Learning this was a challenge because of how fundamentally different it is to PHP. This was also initially hard to use because of licencing issues. However we overcome both of these hurdles with the help of some of the tools mentions below.

Microsoft Access

http://office.microsoft.com

For Release 1 we used Microsoft Access. We chose this because we had enough problems trying to get access to ASP.NET, let alone MS SQL Server as well.

Microsoft SQL Server

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/

We haven't used this yet, but we will in Release 2. We didn't want to spend anymore time in Release 1 trying to get access to this technology.

Internet Information Services (IIS)

http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2003/iis/

This is Microsofts web server. Those members of the team who had Windows XP Professional used this to develop the web component. It doesn't work with Windows XP Home.

WebMatrix

http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/

This is a freeware tool provided by Microsoft for developing ASP.NET code. It's not a mature enough piece of software to use on a large project like ours. However it does provide a nice little ASP.NET development web server. Those of us who have Windows XP Home used this to develop the web component.

Notepad++

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/about.php

This is just a text editor. It's both simple but really feature packed. It's a must for any computer programmer. We chose to use this to write ASP.NET code instead of Microsoft Visual Studio.

Subversion

http://subversion.tigris.org/

This is a version system that is designed to take over from CVS. It provides a central repository where we could store our project. It keeps a records of who made what changes, and allows you to revert to a previous version. A must have program for any project. Even though it's not programming related.

Mozilla Firefox

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

This was the primary browser that we used to develop the web component. It complies with web pages standards much more then Internet Explorer does. It also has some nice extensions available that make developing web sites a much nicer experience.

Internet Explorer

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx

One requirement of our project was that it could be accessed using Internet Explorer. Because of this, we regulary opened our web component in IE to make sure it displayed ok.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to our client, who has provided us with a machine with many of the above development tools.