MS SQL and my need for a little direction [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

开发者_StackOverflow中文版

Closed 11 years ago.

Improve this question

I've been lurking around for several weeks and have been totally blown away by the amount of information and how the community quickly responds. I have noticed that questions like this typically receive sarcastic remarks and sometimes get down voted. Please bear with me as I attempt my first post :)

I little background.. I work at a tiny software company as the "QA department". Our application has a MS SQL back to store customer data and short term loan information for financial service companies. I started working here 6 years ago as a gernal technician to provide support for their call center, so I've been overly exposed to SQL and have become fairly familiar with working with it. You probably wouldn't pay me to develop a enterprise level database, but at this point I've become familiar enough to do most things in SQL.

Why I'm asking my question.. I want to develop an application to store and track our software issues and new dev. I've done research on this website along with asking around and I still feel sort of lost as to which direction I should take. I want the core of the application to be pretty basic at first, to provide various screens between my entities/modules and to create reports to show their various relationships. In the future I want it to be more complex, to provide a web portal of some sort and to start getting into various complex QA software concepts. I've read around and it sounds like I might want some variation of C/VB for the windows portion, but all of the topics have sort of overwhelmed me. Do I want to start with a more basic one that was created 20 or 30 years ago? (I think that's C and C++, right?) or a more recent one like C#? Will I be able to develop a web portal with both of these? (by web portal I'm thinking it would provide access to our database of defects and have username/password sign-in). I've seen that the various .NET languages lean more towards web development, should I start with one of these?

I am at the very beginning of this and I fully understand that I'm jumping into some deep waters here. I want to make sure I don't end up spinning my wheels and that I focus my energy on something that won't end up being a bad idea in 1 or 2 years after I start. So far I've found this website very helpful, if I can pick a direction I know I won't have any problems finding what the next step is. It might help to know that I have no formal or informal programming background (if it wasn't obvious). I'm a 27yo techie who is starting his first venture into programming, go easy on me! Thanks for taking the time to read this :)

---

I won't recommend that you go to C, C++, or VB. C and C++ are used mainly for developement of system software, compilers, etc. VB is deprecated by now; there is a .net version VB.NET, but my preference is C#.

Looks like you are a Microsoft shop. Steer youself towards using C#. Visual Studio provides great support for development of Web Applications with support for holding state in entities backed by MS SQL. I would start with a simple example as given in MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd410597.aspx.

This example uses an Model View Controller based framework that is fairly easy to configure and use. They have great examples.

There is a free framework that also supports MS SQL Entity store http://www.coderun.com/ide/

Enjoy

---

Don't write a line of code. There are literally hundreds of open source and commercial software packages that already do what you want to do. You'd be better of spending time researching them and finding the package that most closely meets your requirements. A good solution will also be extensible enough that you'll be able to modify it to meet all of your requirements.

Since you work for a small company I can guarantee you that using your limited development hours "writing your own" will be counterproductive. You'd be better off adopting something off the shelf and becoming proficient at it. You'll learn more about developing systems like this once you've become intimately familiar with one of them.

Check out JIRA or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems for some other ideas.

---

For the benefit of your company I would recommend to use an existing solution. But if you want to learn and build something of your own, I would suggest that you check out some popular web application frameworks, like:

1. Django
2. Ruby On Rails
3. Zend

Good Luck with your project!

---

Given that your intent is to learn and create something yourself I think you should consider a LAMP stack and PHP with one of the PHP frameworks on top (Cake PHP, code-igniter or the like).

The C++ route is a long hard way (C++ is my language of choice) to learn; as a learning experience I think you will get quicker and more satisfying results with PHP.

I also think that this is a realistic project for someone of your skills over a period of a 6 to 12 months - start with a simple requirement and then build it up to have all the features you need.

If you just want a bug tracking system obviously there are many options that won't demand any development.

---

How much experience do you have with things like installing Linux, Apache, Mysql, etc? If you are completely new to this, then this will be a much tougher task, because there are many layers you'll have to learn before you can even get to the point of writing an end-to-end application.

I would avoid C/C++/C# because there are a lot of things you would need to learn about basic programming before you even got to the stage where you could make database calls.

On the assumption that you don't have experience with LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/(Perl/Python/PHP)), my suggestion would be to start simply, by using a scripting language like Python or Perl. You can very easily get a database connection, and start writing queries, and extracting data from there. If you are used to Windows, I would install ActivePerl or ActivePython, and start from there. You can start building a command line program that does what you want, and then from there, you can move on to creating a web application that can do something similar.

Building a web application would likely be much easier than writing a Windows application, so after you have gotten comfortable with the scripting language, that's the direction I would go afterwards.

Good luck!