My co-op work term is coming to an end at my current workplace and I’ve been given the opportunity to produce an ASP.NET web control that functions similar to Google Suggest which will provide me with something that I can write about for my end-of-term technical report. So, not only will I be coding all aspects of the web control, but I’ll also writing a techical paper that details the process that I followed to create the web control as well as the intimate details as to how it’s been implemented. I suppose this’ll give me a chance to practice the technical writing skills that I picked up last term in the 300-level technical writing course that I attended.

Since I’m relatively new to .NET, it should come as no surprise that I’ve never created a web control before, let alone create one that uses AJAX. But I have used AJAX in my Ruby on Rails site before, although I’ll admit that the experience won’t be all that much help unless I decide to use the Prototype javascript framework within my web control.

Anyway, I have already gently scoured the ‘Net for existing web controls that meet my requirements and, while there are numerous projects and code samples that contain bits that I’ll probably examine closer, I wasn’t able to find one that perfectly fits the bill. (I’m actually pretty sure there are some out there and that I was just not able to find them.) In any case, the most difficult part will probably not be the C# but rather the JavaScript, and with the abundance of XMLHttpRequest JavaScript snippets out there, I’m sure I’ll be able to appropriate (and credit, of course!) at least some of them into my work.

In any case, I’m excited about this project and am looking forward to starting on it this weekend. Like my other pet projects, I’ll probably document some interesting snippets of code here, so stay tuned. : )

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