Well, it’s happened. The project is now officially feature-complete, and work on the coding of the application has essentially stopped as of today. It’s certainly been a long and difficult journey, but all that remains at this point is to thoroughly test the application, and write the documentation necessary for the final assignment submissions.

Looking back, I feel like working on this project was overall very positive. I was lucky to get assigned a good team, both of whom were very motivated and professional. While I can’t say that I was thrilled that the decision was made to code the project using .NET and C#, as I’ve never used these technologies before, at this point I’m actually even somewhat comfortable using them! This is something I’d never thought I’d say after only a few weeks of working with a new technology, but everything I’ve set out to accomplish throughout my work on the project, I’ve been able to do by consulting the documentation and searching for information online. It’s actually been quite fun and I hope to be able to use the framework again in future projects.

As far as the future is concerned, I will likely fork the project’s repository and continue to mess around with it after the class has concluded. There are some improvements – mostly visual – that could be incorporated into the project to make it more visually appealing and user-friendly. I will also likely include it as a project of note on my resume as I begin to apply for jobs following graduation.

As I consider a new side-project to work on following this course, I am as of yet undecided whether or not I will attempt to use .NET and C# to create it. It would be nice to “hone my skills”, so to say, and increase my exposure to these technologies by using them to create a new project, however at the very least, I’m not sure if I’d continue to use the MVC server-side rendering setup, instead using .NET to create a more traditional backend API that can communicate with a SPA created using, for instance, React. I think this would be a best-of-both-worlds setup, allowing me to practice my React coding skills as well as continuing to learn .NET and C#. Decisions…

This was, without a doubt, one of the most useful courses I’ve taken while at OSU. It was really nice to work on a single project for an entire semester, and create something professional and worthy of showing off. Until next time…