Active Challenges

Costing Engine and Admin Tool

Application Overview
The Costing Engine and Admin Tool applications work together to provide a platform for efficiently calculating and viewing Costs of Goods Sold (COGS).

The Costing Engine is a generic calculation engine that is communicated with by an ASP.NET Web Service. It has no graphical user interface of its own. The assembly for the Costing Engine will consist mostly of integrating components built via component competitions. Specific tasks include:

• Accept and validate price updates via a web service
• Accept and validate costing requests via a web service
• Calculate the requests using the generic engine

The Admin Tool is the graphical front-end to administer the Costing Engine. The actual inputs to the generic engine will be configured using the Admin Tool. All calculation results are also viewable through reports (which are standard ASP.NET pages with an 'export' option to Microsoft Excel using a pre-built component). Admin Tool assembly will consist most of converting parts of an HTML prototype to ASP.NET and integrating components.

These applications are to be used by a TopCoder client. All application documentation (including an assembly guide) will be available once registered.

NOTE: Please see eligibility requirements below. Competitors must sign a non-disclosure agreement and pass a background check before being admitted into this competition.

Competition Overview
This assembly competition will consist of prototype conversion, component integration, and extensive unit testing to ensure correct operation.

Each team will be responsible for creating their working environment. The working environment requirement details for this application are outlined in the Application Requirements Specification located in the documentation bundle. An overview of the environment requirements are listed below:

• .NET 2.0 (C#)
• ASP.NET 2.0
• ASP.NET Web Services
• SQL Server 2005
• Windows Server 2003

Documentation/Specifications are available in the application forums here.

TopCoder will compensate teams with first and second place submissions. Initial payment for the winning team will be distributed in two installments. First Checkpoint: When the winning solution is submitted and review board suggestions are integrated. Second Checkpoint: Marked by the completion of the Deployment phase of the project.

Winning Team
Total Payment - $15,000

Second Place Team
Total Payment - $7,500

You must be a TopCoder member, at least 18 years of age, meeting all of the membership requirements. In addition, you must fit into one of the following categories.

If you reside in the United States, you must be either:

• A US Citizen
• A Lawful Permanent Resident of the US
• A temporary resident, asylee, refugee of the U.S., or have a lawfully issued work authorization card permitting unrestricted employment in the U.S.

If you do not reside in the United States:

• You must be authorized to perform services as an independent contractor. (Note: In most cases you will not need to do anything to become authorized)

Your ability to participate in this competition is contingent on the completion and satisfactory review of a background check, agreement to the Assembly Terms of Work and signing of a Non Disclosure Agreement. Once you have registered this information will be emailed to you and should be returned within 24 hours.

All submissions are required to be submitted by the end of Competition Phase. The end of each phase is at 9:00 AM EST.



Registration is closed.

Once your team has working code you are ready to submit, you can do so by emailing your source code to AssemblySubmissions@topcoder.com before the end of the Competition Phase. Your team can submit code as many times as you wish before the submission deadline without any penalties. The last code submitted prior to the deadline will be used as your final submission.