Freelancer

Description

A Self test software is required for an educational institute fully in Arabic,
If you are not an Arabic speaking programmer, please don’t be intimidated by the language, all translations will be provided and all you have to do is make the application fully Unicode and the Arabic text will be in the resources (fully supported in MS Visual Studio and Windows), as for windows’ titles and labels, and reading and writing from the database, Unicode for MS SQL Server, or UTF-8 for MySQL will do the trick, you should also install Arabic support (right to left languages) locally on your machine to be able to perform the job.
The application consists of a database on MS SQL Server or MySQL, and two clients, one for administration and the other for taking the test. The clients must be written in C++, MFC or C#

The admin software: here you can add a new test, define categories (for example, ICDL test, categories can be hardware knowledge, Spreadsheet software…) and then adding questions and a set of answers, for each answer there will be a check box to define if it is the right one or a wrong one, more than one right answers are possible.
For each category a weight can be defined, which will affect the score later on, for example, a question answered right under category with a weight of 30 will score less than one with weight 80 if the scale is from 1 to 100, the software of course will warn the user if all categories’ weights don’t add up to 100.
The admin application must also be able to define an amount of time in minutes for every test.

The second interface is the one the student uses to take the test, after entering a username and password (added in the admin program), he can choose a test to take (one of the defined earlier by the admin) and after clicking “start the test” a full screen window will open, preventing the student from switching to other applications or clicking Alt-Tab or any other way to access any other software or the internet to get answers, the only way to close the application is by clicking “finish the test”.
just after clicking start, a countdown clock will appear at the very bottom reminding the user of the time left that the admin has defined earlier, the test will be like most self test applications, a series of random questions taken from the database from all categories, appearing to the user one at a time with their corresponding answers and check boxes, next and back buttons, until all questions are answered or the user decides to click “finish” to finish the test early, after that a report will show each category and its score (if you have done a Microsoft exam before you know exactly how it looks like) and the results will be printed on the PC’s default printer.
The set of questions for a test shall not appear again to another student since they are chosen randomly.
There are a couple of open source similar software some on sourceforge.net that I don’t mind if you use some of their code
Since it is a Microsoft Visual Studio project I mentioned MS SQL Server assuming you are more familiar with, however, I prefer MySQL since it is easier and smaller to bundle inside the installation application.
I am a programmer myself and would appreciate the code to be fully documented and easy to understand with properly named functions and classes.
A small note: the database, the admin software, and the test software must be assumed to reside on different machines, and in use at the same time, so locking the database is very important to prevent crashing or unexpected behavior, for example, when the user starts the test, the snapshot of the database is taken and whatever the admin is changing at the time of the test, does not affect the students’ program.

If you are not an Arabic speaker please send a small test app with one window to read and write in Arabic to the database just to make sure everything is appearing properly before you go any further.

Payment Scheme:
10% after delivering a quick beta version of the program (binary, without source code or setup files)
45% after delivering the release version and testing it thoroughly (Windows 2000, XP, and Vista)
45% after delivery of source code