I began working on the Event Booking System for a school in 2006. The original system was written in Classic ASP and then I migrated over to ASP.NET after I had completed the IT Helpdesk.

What was the purpose of The Event Booking System?

Soon after I had started my position as an IT Administrator at the school, I was challenged with the task of creating a system that allowed all the internal staff to submit all of their planned events for the term so that an event calendar could be produced by the office admin staff. The School website also needed to be able to import the data to update the up coming events online.

Stages of production:

A few months before this I had developed an online database for a client using Classic ASP. I decided to base the Event Booking System on a similar design because I was familiar with building applications on the Classic ASP platform. Building the application took a couple of weeks before I released it to the office staff for testing. There were a few bugs to iron out, mainly the usual bugs when using punctuation with databases (If you are a developer, I am certain that you know exactly what I am talking about!).

Around the same time, I was also building an IT Helpdesk in ASP.NET, and I was learning how to use Data Grids which were very powerful and allowed things like on-the-fly editing and sorting. It took me a lot of time and effort to learn how to create a working data grid in ASP.NET, but once I had acquired this experience, I then decided to give the Event Booking System a revamp.

I built a new version of The Event Booking System in ASP.NET which used the power of a Datagrid to display the data. I also included dynamic colour changing which would change the colour depending on a criteria of an event. The new system became very popular and I attended various development meetings which focused around feature requests for the new system. One of the most popular requests was recurring events, which I said that I would look into. Eventually I included a recurring events option but put a safety net into the feature to prevent someone accidently creating hundreds of events with a spelling mistake.

About a year after the completion of The Event Booking System, I was offered a new opportunity and decided to move on to pastures new. Before I said goodbye, I gathered any last patch requests and implemented those as a final farewell to my lovely collegues.

A few years had passed, and I was surprised and happy to hear that the web application that I had created was still widely used by the school.

I was very proud of what I had achieved when building this application.

Last updated, August 2018