Tonight is our last class.  I completed my RpML document and we completed most of our final project after long hours of working on it and troubleshooting what went wrong.  As for now, I am trying to see if I can fix our final project to make it work.

So, as the semester comes to a close, so come project due.  Our team, as well as other teams, seem to be having problems leveraging the webservices in VB.  We have spent numerous hours trying to get everything to work right, but we seem to be getting the same errors over and over again.

Tonight we are having a web conference with Professor Haines because he will not be in class tonight.  I am hoping to get some help and guidance on how to slove the problems we are having.

We will find out tonight.

I finished lab 3b last week.  The lab was a little challenging, but if I would have activated everything in the first place I would have ran into no problems.  I started lab 4 last week in class, and got about 2/3 of the way done.  I plan on finishing that today, hopefully.

I am going to start to convert my paper into rpml as soon as I have some free time.  As of right now, I have 2 more hours left at work, then class and then I need to do the reading before class tonight.

I finally had time to sit down and pound out my term paper this weekend.  I did the research before hand, but had no time to sit down and write it.  It went pretty smooth, smoother than I thought and I had just under 1000 words which was a relief.  There was so much information on SOA security standards and solutions that I had to narrow it all down to a few.

As of right now, I am going to try to work on lab 3b and finish that up.

Well, it has been awhile since we got the handout for lab 3.  I have had no time with being gone for a week on spring break, and then being busy the week after trying to catch up.  Hopefully early this week I will be able to start/finish the lab.  I also have a SAP lab to do for another class of mine, which we are using BW 3.5.

I just researched the information needed for my paper due in a week.  I need to start on writing this during my free time this week also.

All in all, this is going to be one busy week for me.

Yesterday I took the midterm exam.  I didn't really know what to expect when signing on to take the exam.  The exam was difficult, but made easier because we could use our book and notes on the exam.  I knew alot of the questions without looking them up, but I looked them up anyhow to make sure.  There were also some tricky questions, which the notes and book helped alot on.  I liked the online format, because I didn't feel the pressure of an in-class exam.  Now, I have to wait and see what I got on the exam.

This week we went over XML and Web Services.  I have worked with XML documents before when working with ASP.Net.  That wasn't that new to me, but Web Services is.  I went through the lab pretty quickly because I wanted to get it done during class, so I didn't understand fully what was going on.  I need to go back through and see what was actaully going on.  It seems to be a pretty powerful tool to use, and I would like to be able to understand it better and be able to implement it into my work.

On another note, season finale of Prison Break is on tonight!!!  Good thing I have DVR to be able to record the episodes because we have class during that time slot.

   Integration of two different databases is a lot harder then I thought it would be.  I figured you just have to change the titles and data types of columns to make them match up, but in fact, it's a lot more complicated then that.  It's a lot more complicated especially when the database is in another language, which is what we did our exercise about.  You have to take into account; currency, measurements, weight; anything which involves different caculations.  Also, the way a different database tracks items could be different, and you have to figure out a way to transform both ways into one.

   After this, you have to integrate it into the system.  This involves alot of communication becuase the database will be different, and you have to train the users on how to use it.  If the users are not comfortable with knowning their way around the system, they will just not use it, or not use it to the best they can.  Communication goes a long way when integrating a new system, especially one as important as the database.

This is my first blog entry.