Last night I worked on my capstone project for finishing up my masters degree. I am writing software that will integrate the store's (www.presenttensebooks.com) Point of Sale software with Amazon.com's web services. The idea is that with our POS software we have to type in every book's data point: title, author, hardcover/paperback, department, vendor, isbn, retail price, and wholesale price. All this stuff can be supplied by amazon's web service via an isbn query.

So at this point I have finished all the code except inserting a 'book' into our POS's database. The problem that took me 2 days to figure out basically boiled down to a lack of documentation on the POS SDK. The catch is that you can't just enter any old department, or vendor, you have to query the POS database to get the acceptable values. This is fine, but is not documented on how to do this anywhere that I could find. Eventually, through scrolling through their API definition I found a IVendorQuery and an IDepartmentQuery! Woot, after trying these out everything flowed smoothly and so now my little project works.

My next task is to clean up the code and write user documentation and test cases. Once done with that I am done with my formal education forever!