Haven't Programmed in Ten Years--Need Help with Project

E

Eradan

[H]ard|Gawd
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Apr 7, 2006
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Hey, guys.

Most businesses have a sign-in book in their lobbies. You come in, write your name, your company, who you are seeing, along with time and date. I have been tasked with writing a piece of software to handle this. It will run on a Windows 7 box with a nice Planar touchscreen display.

I wrote a few web-based ASP/Access apps back in 2001-2002 and haven't developed anything since. I need to get up to speed pretty quickly so I'm looking for suggestions for the app described above.

Management wants to have the sign-in info dump into a database so we can do some simple reporting.

So basically I need some kind of database for the back end and something that looks nice on the front end. Something that will work well with the Windows 7 on-screen keyboard. I don't have much leeway as far as setting up an Apache server or MySQL. They are a Microsoft house. I could probably use Access or SQL Express for the backend.

Your thoughts, comments, feedback are appreciated.
 
Pay someone else to do it. Quicker, less stressful, and you will end up with a solution you can maintain. Struggling through this yourself doesn't seem like the right choice given what you wrote above.
 
I guess what I wrote indicated I'm not capable of doing this.

Unfortunately, farming it out is not an option.
 
Just use Access by iteslf, or Access with a SQL database. Would take 5 minutes to program a form, table, and report to do this. If you want it to look fancy, you can do it in .NET or something.

If you want me to write something up real quick, just let me know!
 
sethmo said:
Just use Access by iteslf, or Access with a SQL database. Would take 5 minutes to program a form, table, and report to do this. If you want it to look fancy, you can do it in .NET or something.

If you want me to write something up real quick, just let me know!
Click to expand...

"Look fancy" I think is the trick here. Even though I haven't done any real development work in a long time, I think I could kick this out of Access in a relatively short time. But since this thing is in the lobby, they want it to look nice, too. I think your standard VBA form isn't very attractive.

I'm going to install Visual Studio tonight and see what I can do. I have a few books on C# that I've picked up over the years but haven't done much with them.
 
You can make an Access form look pretty decent nowadays, far better then Access '97 days. Do you have a screenshot of an idea you are wanting it to look like?
 
Prepare for them asking to print some sort of ID badge and select who you are here to see from a list ;)
 
robvas said:
Prepare for them asking to print some sort of ID badge and select who you are here to see from a list ;)
Click to expand...

There are many commercially available packages that do this and they don't want those features. We evaluated a handful of them and none of them functioned without the badge stuff.
 
sethmo said:
You can make an Access form look pretty decent nowadays, far better then Access '97 days. Do you have a screenshot of an idea you are wanting it to look like?
Click to expand...

I used to rough out this sort of thing in Photoshop but haven't done so yet for this project (just built the rig in my sig a few weeks ago and have yet to get all my apps loaded).

I see how I want it to look and function in my mind's eye. Two fields (name and company) and a submit button. When the info is submitted, the date and time are recorded in the database.
 
Sounds pretty basic. If they are wanting it now, do it in Access. If they don't need it for a few weeks, learn .Net

I lied, it took me about 10 minutes to make a working frontend including the table and searching for a cheesy background lol. It even does prompts the user if they left a field blank so your table isn't full of null records.
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f39/sethmo38/SignInSS.jpg

I don't know how fancy you can make a sign in sheet :p
 
sethmo said:
Sounds pretty basic. If they are wanting it now, do it in Access. If they don't need it for a few weeks, learn .Net

I lied, it took me about 10 minutes to make a working frontend including the table and searching for a cheesy background lol. It even does prompts the user if they left a field blank so your table isn't full of null records.
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f39/sethmo38/SignInSS.jpg

I don't know how fancy you can make a sign in sheet :p
Click to expand...

Nice!

Yeah, that looks perfectly splendid. I was just going to add their company logs and colors for the background. You did this in Access 2010? I just didn't want my form to look like this...

http://www.upsizing.co.uk/Images/PageImages2/Walk_EndToEnd2.jpg

Going to stop by the library on the way home and snag some books. I took an Access class in 1998. Probably need to brush up... :)
 
I used Access 2010. Not a ton has changed, mostly UI and updated button looks and such. Newer versions of Access use different Office references, but the general way of doing things is the same, still uses Visual Basic for coding.

If you go .Net or another language, the form would look the same, just not have the Access GUI at the top.

If you have Access 2007 or 2010 and want to look at that database, shoot me a PM and I will throw it in my Dropbox.
 
They do not want someone coming in to be able to flip through the book and see everyone else that has visited.
 
what is better about a digital guest book?

I think they probably did this in the 70s and 80s and then decided it was a retarded idea. repeating past mistakes...
 
Tear the pages out or use individual sign in forms.
 
bAMtan2 said:
what is better about a digital guest book?

I think they probably did this in the 70s and 80s and then decided it was a retarded idea. repeating past mistakes...
Click to expand...

I have no idea what you're talking about. Guess we have that much in common.
 
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