Well, as some of you know, I'm following up on my associates degree and

learn

 ing  VB

.net

  in Great detail.  The problem I'm having is writing SAMPLE programs that an employer would like to see as a SAMPLE.  I've written my share of Text spinners, file re-namers, Page generators etc.....

But what type of program would be more along the lines of something I would be actually doing at WORK?

Just cant seem to find enough information about how it is to have a

programming

  job and what type of appz I'd be working on.. and what skills to concentrate on.

Any help or Ideas for sample programs that would really showcase my ability would helpful...

~Rob.

Guys that worked for me did a lot of text acquisition, conversion and reporting. We used a lot of old phone systems that could not integrate with contemporary computers, so getting the data out and into a usable format was big.

Time card management is a good 101 level app also.

There's programs to handle it all, but an inventory program for computers in use would be good. Something that kept the OS version, IP address, Windows license etc etc on "

mac

 hines we have in the office" would be good.

/p

reporting software - take database of lots of data, create pretty reports from it. PHBs love pretty graphs.

Shopping cart / catalog - checkout part is important but not a deal breaker. You can use the catalog software you create for your own nefarious purposes as well, so its not a complete waste of time.

Like perk said. A time management type of app. Simplest would be to just track generic work times, of employees, and create reports for that. The most complicated version would be to add in project hour tracking, project management type of tools and then all those supporting reports. Think of a simple version of MS project. example of an online one http://www.basecamphq.com/

unfortunately, when it comes to getting a job, its more a matter of how YOU sell it to them. I walk into many prospective client meetings, not being able to show anything remotely related to what they want done because alot of the work I do is NDA'd to the balls. My portfolio has a literal "trust me" in it. But the thing I have found the most is, you need 2 projects. 1 for the technical guy, which should have some "cool" things that you did, that the tech guy could appreciate. Scraping data from a non-API system (ah BH is worth something but money aint it), 8 way join, 6 remote databases queried via different APIs, whatever else might be Geek Cool. The other type of project you need to show must have lots of graphics and graphs. Corporate looking, use IBM.com as a visual reference. Its really dumb but alot of the time you will be interviewed by really fishing dumb, non-technical, failing upwards, idjuts. They need pretty graphs. Pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs. Throw in some trend analysis and they will love it. If you can accomplish both of those with 1 project, which all the suggestions, you should, then thats perfect.

but really, those "Text spinners, file re-namers, Page generators etc....." would be fine as well, if you explain it COOL enough.

So true 

Programming

  101 Project,

PHP

  scrape and store
... now represented for the future employer:

"... the alphanumeric conversion matrix I've deployed is robust and capable of retasking ill formatted legacy reports from a paper storage requirement into a highspeed data stream that can be embedded into virtually an operating system without appreciable impact to the neighboring services on the

mac

 hine or the storage structures behind it. In addition, I've taken the liberty of building in a high degree of flexibility to the storage schema which will allow us to restructure the output for any member of the enterprise requiring the data from a vectored perspective."

can i use that?


LOL

LMFAO perk!!