NSurvey

For one of the projects I had to do, I had to create an online survey application, which would be used to gather feedback from Microsoft events. Up until then, feedback was collected by handing out a form and entering the data manually.

As I was free to choose how to solve this problem, I suggested using an existing open-source framework and extending it to meet the requirements. This suggestion was quickly approved because on the one hand it showed Microsoft’s commitment to open source and on the other hand it prevented reinventing the wheel. The project used for this solution is called NSurvey. This provides a survey framework, making it very easy to set up surveys, add questions, add users, do mailings, implement security on a survey-based level, perform statistical operations on the answers and add new functionality by extending existing classes.

NSurvey is an ASP.NET application, written in C#, which uses a SQL Server back-end, using stored procedures, and various other layers. The installation of NSurvey went very smoothly thanks to an MSI installer, placing all files in their correct location.

I started by testing the application and learning the overall structure. During this small test round, I began thinking about how the final solution would look.

The rest of this series:

• Survey Overview
• Microsoft Layout
• Belgian Regions
• Answer Types
• Matrix Questions
• MapPoint Integration
• Pie Charts