Project Ideas

Orcblood · March 23, 2015

Hey so I need some ideas for a final project for my advance VB class. It's supposed to be worth about 8 weeks of work. It can be anything as long as it's worth the 8 weeks. We learned about sql databases (the ado side of vb.NET) some such as how to make datasets and queries so I can include that in my project but it can't be anything to complicated as we didn't spend much time and don't know everything.

This is what I have so far. I'm thinking of a fancy GUI design for a grocery store register system. It will have flip charts and the ability to use PLUs. Also you can enter in UPCs. Most the data will be stored in the database. Here's the problem though with this idea.

We did this in away in the last vb class last semester for the final but we didn't use databases and it was for fast food instead of a grocery store with only a few items to choose from. It had about 4 linked forms the last one being a print form to print a receipt that really did work. Since we did something like it last semester this is why I'm hesitant on this idea. It would have to be much more advance than what I did last semester to differentiate itself and that may be too advance for what I got time for.

I really don't have any other good ideas so this is why I'm asking for help. I have to get the project idea approved soon by my instructor.

Any ideas would be awesome! Thanks in advance!

Also thanks for reading this far if you have. I know the grammar is really bad.

Nuluvius · March 23, 2015

...for my advance VB class.

Advanced VB you say? Whatever will they be teaching people next? Delphi 5 perhaps :lol:

You might like to consider that area that you seem hesitant about, the one you say you don't have a lot of knowledge in. I would posit that they may be looking for signs that you are capable of conducting research and demonstrating that you have increased your scope of knowledge.

Further to that, at a guess I'd imagine that you have only been doing WinForms so far? Why not research MVVM and have a go at doing something in WPF? Even if the idea falls closer to the content you have already covered, the implementation difference might be enough to set it substantially apart.

madknight3 · March 24, 2015

If you aren't a fast learner or if you don't have a lot of experience learning new things on your own, you may want to stay away from anything you haven't already touched on in class. Learning every little thing in something like WPF might take up too much of your time and greatly reduce the size of what you can produce. Same idea goes for choosing an ORM, like Dapper or the Entity Framework, for your data access needs. I don't know what your teacher is expecting in terms of project size, and I don't know if using something self learned will change that expectation. It should, but if it doesn't for some reason, it could cause you problems.

You may be perfectly capable of learning these quickly though, and it would be impressive. Certainly shows how much extra work you put into a project so long as your teacher would recognize it.

With that said, I'm not sure how large of a project the grocery store register would be. It might be fine depending on what you're planning, but plan to extend it out to modelling a whole grocery store if it becomes too small. The register would be the part of the system a customer would use, but what about employees and administrative staff? Can they select an option which allows them to log in and give them their own set of features?

How would different departments work in your system? Can the manager of the bakery add produce items or will you make sure only the produce manager can do that? Can a department manager hire a new employee or is that something a store manager can only do?

Will you give users a reward system? Will you try to keep track of store profits and expenses? Will you limit inventory management based on these store profits? Maybe each department is only allocated so much of a budget to work with each week.

There's a lot you can do with it.