During this work term, I was introduced to the !MPACT team and product. I spent this term working on the business object team; this consisted mainly of Java programming. Development was mostly done in Visual Studio, specifically Visual Basic and Visual J++. The bridge between languages was handled by COM, at the time automatic generation by Visual J++. However, the need arose to customize the COM interface more than Visual J++ could offer, and so I was given this task as a major project for the term. At first, this was done by hand coding an IDL file. However, I developed an in-house program IDLGen to parse Java source files and generate the IDL file automatically.
This term I was assigned to the user interface team to assist in implementation of several features as !MPACT went into beta release. Therefore, most of this term consisted of programming in Visual Basic. I was also involved with quality assurance (system testing).