The term project is your opportunity to be creative and work on something that you find interesting. The only restriction is that it must relate to the course material (ASP.NET or e-commerce).  I encourage you to be creative, but if you are stuck for ideas I have listed a few below.

I recommend that you discuss your project idea with me before investing a lot of time in it. I can help you define the scope of the project and may be able to provide useful tips to get you started. 

1. Project ideas

2. Project grading

3. Citing References

1. Project Ideas

I encourage you to be creative and do not limit yourself to the ideas below. Hopefully these ideas will seed your imagination.

• Create a web site in ASP.NET for a small retail store, company or organization.

• Do something with Google Maps API. MapCraigs.com is a good example of an application that combines screen scraping and Google Maps. While the scale of MapCraigs.com is much more than expected for the project it illustrates a number of ideas that could be utilized.

• Do something that uses AJAX.

• Screen scraping and regular expressions offer many possibilities:

  • BrokenLinkFinder.aspx -- This program starts at the root page of a web site and uses screen scraping, regular expressions, arrayLists and recursion to check every page in the site for dead hyperlinks. This project is more difficult than it looks because you have to deal with the many syntax variations for anchor tags (with single or double quotation marks, absolute and relative links). Plus, working with recursion is always interesting.  You must be VERY careful to stay on the web site or your program will start roaming the web and run for a very long time. To avoid causing performance problems for the server, you should add a circuit breaker in your code that terminates the program after about 100 links. Add the circuit breaker very early on in the development process.

• Do something fun with Google's web services. You can find ideas on the web or in the book Google Hacks (I have a copy of this book that you may borrow for a day or two.) Google SmackDown is a good example.

• Be creative...

2. Project Grading

Your project should include an "about" page that lists its main features (similar to the "about this site" page on the bookstore and music store projects).  This will assure that I do not miss any important features when grading it.

Projects are graded based upon the following criteria:

• Relevance to the course.

• Challenge/difficulty

• Educational value

• Creativity

• Professionalism of finished product.

3. Citing References

Coding projects often utilize code snippets published in books or the Internet. I encourage you incorporate as much pre-written code as possible into your project, but you must give credit to the original source. You will receive credit for finding it and successfully incorporating it into your project. Any code that is written by someone else and turned in as your original work is plagiarized and will be treated as such.