I was hired by Susquehanna Technologies, or SusQtech. They are located in Winchester, VA. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and design websites for large associations. The job was an internet programming position using C# and ASP.NET. Some experience in C# and .NET was required. They had hired two other interns, one from JMU and another from Shepherd College (WV). They had a special training session for the new employees as they went over their systems. The systems that they used to create these websites were MemberPortal, Microsoft Content Management System, Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Microsoft SQL. In the training session, they familiarized all of us with these systems and went over how they worked and tied in together and showed us some source code and demo sites that we could look at to further understand the process of developing these large scale websites.

I was assigned to several websites as a developer, so if they had any problems, they would post the problems on an Extranet, which was just a website where people could go and enter new issues that they were having or things that they wanted changed, and we would be assigned to certain action items, or tasks, that we would have to resolve. Some of these would be large changes and some would be minor changes, such as entering the text “the” before an organization name.

I was also assigned various projects throughout the internship. The largest project I developed was an XML Form Generator. The point of this project was to read in an xml file and create an online form from it where people could submit information to an e-mail address. I would work on this during my idle time between action items. Before I started this project, I wasn’t very familiar with XML and spent a lot of time on Google looking up how to retrieve data from the documents and the best way to organize this data. With a little knowledge of XML, an end user could create a form without using HTML and without programming a component to handle the form submission and once they were done the XML, they could post it online and it would gather information and send it to the specified address. When I started the design, I left it open to upgrading. For example, I made it so it would be possible to have more than one page and also grouped the fields, so that they could be shown in a fieldset. Also, I made it so there could be several groups in a page and several pages in a form, actually, an unlimited amount of each. By leaving this open for upgrades, I could make it a much more useful tool in the long run and it also made making changes to the tool very simple.

While making the XM Form Generator, I decided that it would be a great idea to have a program that can create the XML file for the user, instead of having the user try to edit the XML. I started working on that in my idle time after I was finished the XML Form Generator. I am almost finished with the XML Form Creator, but there is still a lot of work to do before I can give it to a client.

Another big project I worked on was a Career Center for another one of our clients. They wanted a place for users to go to post resumes, browse resumes, post jobs, and browse jobs. This was a complete different experience, because unlike the XML Form Generator, I had strict requirements I had to follow. I think I actually liked the requirements more than not having any. This way I could just follow the requirements instead of thinking of how I should implement this. I think the two hardest things with this was letting users upload resumes to the server and then putting them in a Resource Gallery in Microsoft Content Management System and also handling the Credit Card Processing information. I had never done anything with credit cards before, but they already had a credit card authorization class that I could just use in my code, but it wasn’t the easiest code to follow or implement in my project.

I also had to implement an existing survey tool from one website into another website. I quickly found out that the websites were totally different and had to rewrite a big chunk of the survey tool to make it work properly in the new site. When I rewrote the code, I made sure that it could be easily adapted into another new project and made notes on what I changed incase they wanted to put it in a new project.