Version II is on the way :)

Versioning; something I have hated lont time ago. I never believed in versioning and its importance till I had to do it myself. Another thing I wondered about for a long time 'Does SW vendors have to remove the original old product that we lived with, liked, and loved that much ? ' I never believed they have to, till I had this experience myself with my lovely http://www.m-assessment.info

If you do not know yet, www.m-assessment.info was part of my master experience. Thanks to ALLH, I had my master thesis finished. www.m-assessment.info is the web site I have as an implementation of my tasks.

But now, it is time to take down www.m-assessment.info to present a new thing. A new thing that matches the new era. Era of: Mobile.

I will not say any more about my lovely www.m-assessment.info except that it is coming back, more powered, more stronger, more prettier, and more... Mobile.

Thank You my lovely web site, I am working on the new version now. Wait for me soon.

Yours...

Haitham A. El-Ghareeb

Crystal Reports

When you check the current Administration part of the site, you can view the results. System Design results is available at this link

http://www.m-assessment.info/admin/SystemDesignGrades.aspx

It does not look good actually. I use a Data Grid to view the results. I thought about using Crystal Reports to visualize data in a good looking format. I designed the report, and when it came to deploying the reports I was surprised that the server does not deply Crystal Reports. Actually the server does not deply neither Crystal Reports nor Reporting Server. I do not call this a design bug, I'd rather think about it more as a 'Planning Bug' because I have not checked the AMS requirements thouroughly and have not picked a suitable server to host AMS. I am still thinking either I will continue AMS, so I will re-build the system from the very beginning. I am thinking about assigning one of the graduation projects groups of next year to AMS, and when I re-think about it, I figure out that AMS has achieved the required task of it, and it shall retire right now. The thing was: Utilizing SOA in systems won't affect system performance and/or user completion time. I'd rather leave e-Learning tasks to e-Learning Unit of the University, so I am really thinking about spending more time with guys in the e-Learning Unit "as I am going to stay in Egypt for a while".

I believe Moodle holds features richer than AMS. AMS might turn to be a history soon. If this will be the case, sure I will write a separate entry announcing this.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays to All of us, hopefully we all enjoyed, enjoying, and will enjoy all the Holidays in Peace and Love under God Mercy.... Amen

Design Bug

This huge mistake is caused only as a result of 'Lack of Experience'. Thankfully I am working on AMS right now so I can really find out how much I was missing from practical experience. I found out that: I have no 'Classes' in the system, and honestly this is not accepted to me. I have a web pages that insert, update, delete, and assess data from a database but I did not use Object Oriented Programming. It is more like a database interface, nothing more. I shall start correcting this problem, but I won't start doing so till students finish the Second Year Data Structure assessment.

I thought about the Classes I shall have in the system, and how they relate to each other.

• Assessment ( that includes questions, each assessment can have different formats)
• Student ( If I handled student as a class in the first place, I should have solved too many situations I have been through in building AMS)
• Courses

I gotta admit I got stuck in the gap between Relational databases and Object Oriented Concepts. I read a lot about this gap in the books (specially Object Oriented, and Object Relational Databases books) but I have never felt it like I did this time.

I learned database (if I am allowed to say I learned database) before I learned Object Oriented Concepts, so I am totally affected with Relational Databases concepts too much more than Object Oriented Concepts. I even start building systems by building databases, and apparently this is not completely wrong. I missed the OOP completely, I don't have any UML diagrams, and I know this is a disaster, but this is what happened. The funny thing is: Students are attending their assessments successfully, without a single class in the AMS :)

Thanks to God, merciful God
:)

Session Timed Out

Here is the scenario:

I have the questions with correct answers stored in the database. Currently, we support only two types of questions: True/False and MCQ. I load the questions in the Page Load event, then assign items to labels and radio buttons and tried assigning correct answers to variables so to use them in marking but I faced the situation where all the results are Zeros.

Why? coz the correct answers change with page post back, so I immediately thought about storing the correct answers as session variables, and it worked perfectly with me. Till a situation took place with one of the students while he was attending the assessment. He exceeded the Session Time. The page did not expire till he submitted the answers and the CheckAnswers functions started to read the session variables!! Ooooooops! There are no session variables coz session timed out.

Two things:

• I shall edit the Web.config file 'debug' section, coz I don't wanna students to see error details
• I shall add an exception handler for the Session Timeout Exception
  
• Actually, I shall add timer to the assessment. Assessment shall not be left open the way it is now (though it is not anymore coz I figured out the session timeout scenario and notified students that they shall finish the assessment within 5 minutes, and thankfully it is going well), but I can not depend on this. AMS must upgrade
  

And what I am doing now? I am defining AMS Bugs so I will start fixing them as soon as I can.

By the way, I know that default Session Timeout is 20 minutes so I did not see this exception coming, but after this experience I can tell: Do not expect server administrators to be leaving default settings as it is, ask my server administrator and he will assure you this tip ;)

Introduction to Bugs

I am not defending myself when I say I made AMS only in couple of days; so what, there are mistakes I shall have not done. The thing is: This is my first real system. I remember that while I was testing the system, the first aspx page I wrote was the one with a button and a label box, and one event handler: Button Click. When I click the button the label text changes to be "This is Working". I had a problem with believing one day I will do something working. Honestly, this experience changed me a lot. Regarding the Bugs, I have read millions of times that no matter how much you test the system it still has bugs, and I believe this. So, what do you think about a system that was prepared in two days and by real novice System Architect ?

I have never feared criticism, and waiting for Bugs you can find so we; together can make AMS better.

Thank You

Data Structure is Available

Now, Second Year Students at FCI Mansoura can take the online assessment for Data Structure. Assessment consists of 5 True/False Questions with full mark out of 5. The database holds the names of 440 students and 200 True/False Items.

For Questions, IDs, and Passwords Please mail me at:
haitham_elghareeb@yahoo.com

Thank You