I am working on something pretty interesting at the moment – at least interesting for me, you might not think so :p How it came about is thus – I’ve been applying for jobs at various places and this week I suddenly heard from one of the places I applied at. They wanted to know whether I knew ASP.NET and when I answered in the affirmative, they said that they were still starting up the company at which I applied for employment but that they had a client who had an urgent requirement that needed to be met now. They wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking up the job and I said yes. From what I’ve gathered so far, the client wants a specialized ASP.NET component which reads and extracts data from a variety of CSV (Comma Separated Value) files in a consistent manner. It’s basically a method to import data from a variety of PIM’s (Personal Information Managers) in a standard manner.
While we have not come to an agreement upon the terms for the project nor received the go ahead from the client, I decided to spend some time working on the base class upon which the subsequent component that the client wants will be built. This way, I’ll actually know what’s possible and what’s not possible before I start work on the actual project because I hate saying that something can be done without actually having done it before and while I do have Visual Studio.NET and C# experience, and have even worked with CSV file access before using C#, I haven’t done something *exactly* like this and I am always wary of something unexpected cropping up :p So, I have been working on the base class which is simply a CVS reader component which can access any CVS file, figure out the number of columns and then output the data record by record in a manner consistent with other database access mechanisms. I am part way through with the code now but am actually getting the crucial bits at the moment and once it is all done, there still remains the testing :p
But my hope is that I will have a prototype to show the client when the go ahead is actually received and the client can confirm or deny as to whether this is what they had in mind. If the basic component satisfies the client, then I’d have made a head-start on the project and if it doesn’t, I’d then know what was wrong and be able to start the project with the necessary information and *know* that I had the correct input – so that I won’t lose much time. So either way, I guess it won’t hurt. Of course, there is the possibility that they might decide not to go ahead with the project but even then nothing would be lost since I would have come out with a CSV reader component that I can use in some other project :p