Development Schedule

I’ve been writing up the Development Schedule in Microsoft Project.  I think the schedule is looking very good and hopefully doable!  I was really excited to try out Microsoft Project.  ACM has student software, so I was able to download Microsoft Project as a result of my student ACM membership, which was convenient!  If you happen to have a student membership in ACM, I highly recommend that you take a look at the MSDNAA program page as there are several useful programs you can get for free.

MS Project is a seriously complex program!  I had to go through a lot of help documentation to figure out what I was doing.  Thankfully, there is a really helpful step-by-step help panel that takes you through creating a project, scheduling tasks and assigning resources.

There is now a very nice calendar and task chart for Team MangoBunnies.

I’d really like to keep track of our tasks on an online project task manager.  If you have any suggestions for a task manager, please let us know!

Also, Ashley isn’t completely jazzed about the team name, MangoBunnies.  I truly can’t imagine why, since bunnies are cute and adorable and mangoes are scrumptious!  If you happen to have any team name suggestions, we’d like those too!

Online Training

The MangoBunnies met this morning (or this evening, depending on where you are) for an online training Live Meeting.  This meeting went over the requirements for the Qualifying Round submission.

We have most of the submission done, but we still need to do some editing.  We also need to add the optional parts, since it will make our lives easier when we put together the 1st Round submission.  We also need to finish the Development Timeline and create the statement for our use of the Windows Mobile SDK.

We also found out that we will each receiving an XBOX 360 game.  Ashley and I have almost taken up video games, so this could be fun.  Malisa is already well on her way with games and would probably give us a sore beating if we played anything with her.  For now we will stick to our 11%-14% accuracy!

How Things are Going

Currently, I think things are going quite well.  There has been a lot of activity and collaboration on our Google Group, which is very good news!  After we turn in our Qualifying Round deliverables, I’ll post them here on the blog.  Probably in multiple posts so you can pick and choose what to read with easy topic dividers.

We’ve decided to use the Windows Mobile SDK in our project.  This was for two reasons:

1. Our project lent itself well to being put on a mobile device.
2. If we use the Windows Mobile SDK we get a Windows Mobile Device to test our app on, so we don’t have to use my Blackjack!

If anyone has any experience creating a mobile phone application, your expertise and advice would be much appreciated!

We’ll be in touch soon!

The Imagine Cup

Every year, Microsoft sponsors the Imagine Cup. This is the premier technology competition for students. The competition asks students to use technology to solve real-world problems. This year, the competition is focused on the United Nations Millennium Goals.

Two of my good friends, Ashley and Malisa, and I have decided that we want to enter the competition. We're entering the competition for Software Design. So far the three of us have decided that we would like to work towards the UN Millennium Goal of helping to Combat HIV/AIDS.

Throughout this process of developing software, we will be learning lots and lots of things! I, personally, have never created a whole application before, so this will be a valuable learning experience for me. Microsoft has provided learning resources for Imagine Cup teams, which we plan on utilizing heavily!

I'm starting this blog so that we can share our experience with everyone. I plan to blog about our successes and things that we are having trouble with. We would love to hear feedback from you!