College Programming Project

I have just got my Programming assignment for my college course and we have to create a program using Visual Basic (I could probably swing using another language as I have knowledge in C and various web scripting languages).

The trouble is whatever happens we have to do it for one of the tasks listed on the page, they are:

1: Web Browser (For a Merit you have to include Bookmark functionality)

2: Media Player (Support for at least .avi and .wav)(For Merit must contain playlist support)

3: Wordpad like application including load and save (for Merit must also contain search facility)

4: Calendar including scheduling capability (Merit: Must be customisable)

So, after the 3 seconds it took me to scan over the basic project ideas, I thought great, I'll just make an iCal clone. Then I went and looked at the pictures of iCal and realised how much work I'm going to have.

Firstly is there anyone who can give me a footing as to how to implement any kind of scheduling system (I can make a calendar that works in about a minute).

Secondly is there anyone who can suggest an alternative programming language this would be easier in (I could do it really easily in PHP and DHTML but I doubt that counts as Programming).

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Implementing a scheduling system with VB6:

First, I would ask the teacher if reusing either the operating systems scheduling solution or building an alternative user interface to Outlook is allowed.

If any of these can be answered yes, I would either look into the windows AT command and build an app around it or import Outlooks type library into the project and code around the various appointment objects.

If not, you'll need to have an understanding of VBs file handling, how you can put a Variant containing a Date to a disk file and much more. Of course, you can always utilize a Database using Jet, ADO or ODBC. VB6's excellent data aware controls will not necessarily look as good as the MSCAL calendar control (your one minute job) but It'll be largely feasible.

With VB, I wouldn't go for per pixel accurate iCal cloning because of the limitations of the VB Form and its intrinsic controls. I also wouldn't recommend using C/C++ for the project because of the time limit - as a beginner, you'll surely hit a wall when it comes to decent UI programming with C/C++.

hth,

herd

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