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Sample ReportsJoshua Dearth As my co-op comes to an end, I find myself reluctant to head back to school. I really enjoyed my co-op and I consider myself extremely lucky to have gotten it. The whole experience was amazing for me because I started the job unsure of myself and my abilities and now that I am finished, I find myself with a new confidence. At the beginning of my co-op, I was given simple tasks to slowly work me into the feel of how the job and the process of creating software works. At the end of the co-op, I found myself knee deep in the internal workings of the company's program. I had to learn how OPC (OLE for Process Control) servers and clients work because I was given the task of making the company's OPC server more compliant with the standards set down by the OPC Foundation. I worked on this for a couple of weeks and when I was done, I had a pretty good working knowledge of how OPC works. However, this was only a small part of the things I learned while on the job. I also had to learn how MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) worked to be able to do just about anything while I was there. MFC is a Microsoft created basis on which people can write program, and on which most programs that are written for Windows machine are build. Knowledge of how MFC works is something that is very useful for a programmer to know, and as such, I am now that much more marketable in the real world. One of the bigger perks to the job is the fact that I can now add two new programming languages to my resume. At one point during my co-op, I was required to take some server code that was written in C++ and wrap it using C# code. This was done so that DOW could begin developing their won products using our product. Also, as a consequence of this project, I was forced to write a sample program for the people at DOW to show them how to use our software to fulfill their needs. This sample program was written in Visual Basic which used the C# wrapper that I made to talk to the C++ based server that our company has. I learned so much from just this project alone. As I worked on different projects for my co-op, I was also required to work in conjunction with people at other companies in order to deliver a product. I worked mostly for DOW Chemical Company while on co-op and was constantly emailing and calling various programmers and management people from DOW trying to fix problems and design new products for them. Overall, my co-op experience was great and I learned an incredible amount. I'm really glad that I got the opportunity to work at ControlSoft and that I had such a good time. |
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