Benford Does Stuff

My last project for this quarter was to write a Graphical User Interface which would allow users to generate an XML based quiz, as opposed to manually creating one with a text editor. Though relatively simple, this task was a bit of a departure from my previous experiences which largely centered around command line programs. The goal was to support generation of a quiz which could have multiple questions,  each of which could have multiple responses. The UI allows users to enter in a question text and solution. Once that is written, it is possible to add responses which have a response text field and a checkbox to indicate the correctness of the response. It is possible to have multiple correct responses in a single question. There are buttons to add and delete questions and responses. Updates to existing fields happen automatically when focus leaves the field, so there is not need for an explicit update widget. The greatest challenge here is that with a GUI, the user can do lots of things at different times, which necessitated that I make the interface robust even when odd input is given, such as attempting to remove a question  when there are no questions to remove. Pressing cancel at a save file dialogue box also triggered an exception which needed to be caught. We’ll be updating our tools next quarter. Visual studio 2005 will be upgraded to the 2008 version,  and we’ll toss Visual Source Safe in favor of a flavor of subversion designed for the .net environment.