CSC – My experience this year

The purpose of this post is to let people know how I’m getting on at CSC and what i have been up to 5 days a week, paying particular attention to what it is like in the industry to prepare people at University in my year.

I have been working for CSC now for 4 months on an industrial placement. In these 4 months I have learnt and experienced an immeasurable amount of skills working in the IT industry. I have got to say i definitely don’t regret taking a year out from my degree (although there was times where I thought I wish I was in DEC10 pulling all nighters with the crew), I definitely recommend it.

I have increased my technical skills over the last 4 months but I think what i have learnt most of all is how a software development environment works, how people think in the industry, how people develop and interact with peers/ managers, how we interact with users. All this stuff from a students perspective is perceived as wishy washy irrelevant stuff, but it is essential (Owen knows! Owen is right!)

Linking the software development to business cases is pivotal too, as it is a business after all and we need to try and quantify the savings a company gets from better software, so we get paid for coding it! Although sometimes this can be a challenge, especially within the NHS!

Another important point to note is being a ‘Software Engineer’ (yes that’s my job title, sexy i know d:)  from my experience working on a small development team is more than coding, a lot more.  Testing, deploying code, designing interfaces and models, documentation both in and out of code, configuration on servers and local machines, management of databases and resources and user involvement are all just as important.

Technically speaking I have had experience in a good number of different technologies, some at greater depth than others. A few i have listed below:

• Programming in C# and the .NET environment.
• ASP.NET, XHTML, CSS, AJAX with JS
• XML
• SQL SERVER  and T-SQL scripting
•  using O(i)SQL/MSDOS scripts for deployment
• Crsytal Reports
• VBA (this is not as easy as it sounds)

So… what do i actually code i hear you asking? Well I’m going to deliberately leave that out of this public blog post because of confidentiality and such (:

Overall I have had a good 4 months!

I am off for 10 days for family time + food @ xmas then partying with friends + drink @ new years before i return to the routine of 9 till 5 until August.  This is the one thing that’s a drag sometimes, the same routine every day, I like variety and impulsiveness as some days I’m in the zone and lovin’ coding and getting loads of work done then some-days I’m tired.

But Overall I am liking my year out and would like to thank all that have supported and helped me be where I am now.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

asp tags not visible by XHTML DOM structure?

I am using ASP.NET. I have a text box with an image adjacent to it. When this image is clicked on a model box pops up with a pretty calender. When the user clicks on a date the model box closes and the text box now contains the date – this all works, I have implemented it several times on several web pages for consistency.

The problem comes with the Text Changed event of the text box, it doesn’t fire! It doesn’t fire at all until a post-back occurs! This is a problem for me because I want to add seven days to the date that has just been populated in the text box and display the new date in a label underneath the text box, as soon as the date is visable - a simple thing I want to do, so you would think!?

I have thought about the problem and and after many debugging sessions trying to figure it out I have decided to use Java-Script as you can specify the ‘OnChange’ event for a text box which solves the problem, well half solves it.

I have managed to get the event to work as it displays an alert box on text changed, hurrah! But I have spent several hours trying to use the getElementById and getAttribute functions of the DOM to get the text property of the text box and put the contents in the text property of the label – with no luck.

I have downloaded a java-script debugger that works in Fire-fox and it tells me that the getElementById returns no value. I tried the same code with a <p> instead of a <asp:TextBox> and it works, therefore the problem must be: the asp tags do not work/are not readable with the XHTML DOM structure of the page. Bugger. I have spent an hour browsing forums + google for answers with no luck.

I am annoyed that I cant fix this seemingly simple problem that the client needs. It is past 5pm on a Friday, i am calling it a week.

Any help appreciated.

layering on a web form

How nice would it be to have layers on an ASP web form?

“What do you mean”, I antisapate you thinking…

well here is a simple example i keep annoyingly coming across, when wanting to have a required field validator and a custom validator validating one field on a web for they must be placed side by side, or below each other which leads to a messy form if you have many fields each having two validator controls… So using layers (the same concept photoshop has) would enable me to have one required field validator with Zorder 1 and the other 2 meaning both can be at the same position on the page (assuming these validations are mutually exclusive otherwise hungarian may occur lol).

If this deature were present on the next major release of ASP.NET, all I can say is WOW – what amazing possabilities! semi-transparwent images on top of each other….etc… this is needed for web apps to be true web apps IMO.

asp.net breaking the ‘rules’

coding today at work I came accros a data control you can place on a web form that contains properties. These properties are used to connect to a data source (sql, xml… etc…). You can then link this control to a grid and hay presto you got a 3 (or n)-tier application architecture, in dangerously potentially 1 or 2 tiers… tut tut tut.

A layered architecture is there for a reason, to make it easy to extend code, read code, modify code amongst many other useful reasons. Although this method of data access is easy to code at first, in the long run (90% of the time) this will not be very benefitial and you wiull have to recode or make things difficult at a later date.

naughty naughty.