Richard Halstead-Nussloch--May 2002

You will write two or three concept papers during the term. These will serve to allow you to research issues and techniques that are useful to windows application development. They should have a direct value to your learning and also make a contribution to your group's progress on the final project. Some example information goals to investigate include, but are not limited to:

• What is a windowing application and how does it compare with a Microsoft ™ Windows application?

• Compare and contrast VB, VBA, and VBScript.

• Tools and techniques for connecting databases to windows applications.

• COM and windows applications.

• A technical or development issue that your project team needs to resolve.

Each paper should be between 5 and 10 pages long and incorporate material from the course and our text(s). The paper should also be based on material that you find in other books, publications, the library, the web, and/or develop from your own experimentation.

Each paper must have:

A title page with a meaningful title, your name, this course title, and an abstract.

An Introduction section, describing the issue or technique that you investigated.

A Method of Approach section, describing how you performed your investigation in enough detail so that another IT professional could duplicate what you did.

A Findings section, describing what you found in your investigation with appropriate citations to where you found it. If you have any doubt about citing references, over-cite them. The web site for CS6023 might be helpful for you here http://tapestry.spsu.edu/drrich/classes/cs6023

A Recommendations section, describing what in light of your findings that you recommend should be done to ensure quality windows application development.

A Value section, describing the value, importance, and benefit of your findings and recommendations for both

• Your group's final project
• Your education

A References and Bibliography section, listing the references and bibliographic citations used in your paper. Please pay significant attention to citing references and sources. If you have any questions, consult the CS6023 web site (URL above).

An Acknowledgements section, describing the use that you made of other people's help, including your instructor, classmates, friends, family members, co-workers, etc.

Note that plagiarism, tempting as it is, will not be tolerated. If you want to include material that you download from the web or copy from books, etc., make sure you that clearly indicate through quotes and reference citations the material that you have copied or downloaded. Also, you need to actually write (at least 3 pages of) summary, analysis, synthesis, etc. of (copied or downloaded) material in your own words. This is not an English composition assignment, and I will accept any English prose that I can understand. (If I can't understand it, I will let you know and give you a chance to fix the writing.) But, I will not tolerate plagiarism--meaning I will grade as a zero any concept paper assignment submission that I conclude involves plagiarism.