Our test plan is kind of depressing, Team 1 has only been able to get one service working-- membership service.  Nothing else is working at this point, so our test plan is all full of Failed in big bold and red.  I guess thats what you have to come across in real-world testing too, things aren't always going to work, but this is getting really frustrating!!

I'm getting really frustrated with the project.  My group has basically everything set up on the VB side, but our web services are not functioning.  We thought we had it all figured out, and we knew how to leverage the provided web services, but we must be missing some piece.  It seems like it should be simple, but its not panning out that way at all.

I'm really glad I went through the SAP XI exercise Professor Haines discussed in class.  It seems like it will really help alot with our group projects.  I just wish I had known about our team namespaces before I went through all that because now I have to do it all over again with the team namespace!

I've finished the rough draft of my paper-- it definetly needs a little bit of editting, but I'll finish that up this week.  I have to say I found out some interesting things about "Green IT", not all of which I could include in my paper because of its lack of relevance to integration.  It is certainly an up and coming area of focus and I'm really glad I chose it as my topic.

I'm glad we went through lab 3B in class because I would have spent a while trying to figure out what I had done wrong otherwise... I was copying the wrong statment into the final testing portion.  So simple, yet it caused so much trouble!

So I tried to do Lab3B and I got through everything okay until the last test part, which I'm guessing is the compilation of everything and it won't work.  I went back through everything I've done and everything looks and works how it should, so I'm stumped!  I guess I'll just wait till we go through it further after spring break.  Have a good week off everyone!

I have to admit-- midterm exams are a lot more enjoyable when you're in jammies. 

I agree with Mary (I think that's whose blog it was).  It is very interesting and somewhat comical that SOAP no longer stands for anything.  In IT though it seems that people are so accustomed to acronyms, and at least in my company often don't ever know what they stand for, that the actual meanings are somewhat arbitrary.  If they were to change the acronym SOAP to something that is more current and accruate I have a feeling that most people would continue to refer to it as SOAP just because thats what its always been for them.

In the past I have been weary of XML, possibly because I never knew what the acronym stood for, but mostly because I had no idea what XML docs were used for.   The exercise was helpful because it wasn't complicated and revealed all the different aspects that are behind viewing an XML file.  Now eXtensible Markup Language files won't be quite as foreign and its nice to have one less unknown acronym floating around.

I really liked the last section of the reading we had to do for yesterday's class.  It shows that no matter how much a company or even a specific project can get wrapped up in what is happening today, it is also essential to keep looking forward.  If big companies like Wachovia are directing focus towards streamlining processes and virtualization many more companies are likely to follow suit.

I'm not really sure what the original intent was for a work-around, but we got as far as informing the clients that there was another project team working on a "compatability pak" for the two applications and they decided to no longer pursue the use of Sharepoint.  Things were becoming too complicated for them, with both the Microsoft products and other internal issues.

I've discovered several ways in which I already work with Application Integration in my job. 

In a very simplistic sense--  I am currently trying to work out a solution to allow a client to have functionality with both existing XP Windows programs that are built into business applications she uses everyday, and Windows 2003 applications which are necessary for the new Microsoft SharePoint 2007 suite I am supposed to be setting her up to use.  It's more complicated than it sounds and is involving alot of negiotiation with both my co-workers in the IS department and the clients on the business side.... all in a days work....

This is my first blog entry.  This class sounds like it will be interesting...especially using VisualBasic for something a little more applicable to real-world situations than I have in past courses.