Hopefully, I'm going to finish my undergraduate studies next semester and I'm thinking about the topic of my final project. And yes, I've read the questions with duplicate title. I'm asking this from a bit different viewpoint, so it's not an exact dupe.
I've spent at least half of my life coding stuff in different languages and frameworks so I'm not looking at this project as a way to learn much about coding and preparing for real world apps or such. I've done lots of those already. But since I have to do it to complete my degree, I felt I should spend my time doing something useful instead of throwing the whole thing out. I'm planning to make it an open source project or a hosted Web app (depending on the type) if I can make a high quality thing out of it, so I decided to ask StackOverflow what could make a useful project.
Situation
I've plenty of freedom about the topic. They also require 30-40 pages of text describing the project. I have the following points in mind (the more satisfied, the better):
Something useful for software development
Something that benefits the community
Having academic value is great
Shouldn't take more than a month of development (I know I'm lazy).
Shouldn't be related to advanced theoretical stuff (soft computing, fuzzy logic, neural networks, ...). I've been a business-oriented software developer.
It should be software oriented. While I love hacking microcontrollers and other fun embedded electronic things, I'm not really good at soldering and things like that.
I'm leaning toward a Web application (think StackOverflow, PasteBin, NerdDinner, things like those).
Technology
It's probably going to be done in .NET (C#, F#) and Windows platform. If I really like the project (cool low level hacking), I might actually slip to C/C++. But really, C# is what I'm efficient at.
Ideas
Programming language, parsing and compiler related stuff:
Designing a domain specific programming language and compiler
Templating language compiled to C# or IL
Database tools and related code generation stuff
Web related technologies:
ASP.NET MVC View engine doing something cool (don't know what exactly...)
Specific-purpose, small, fast ASP.NET-based Web framework
Applications:
Visual Studio plugin to integrate with Bazaar (it's too much work, I think).
ASP.NET based, jQuery-powered issue tracker (and possibly, project lifecycle management as a whole - poor man's TFS)
Others:
Something related to GPGPU
Looking forward for great ideas!
Unfortunately, I can't help on a currently existing project. I need to start my own to prevent further problems (as it's an undergrad project, nevertheless).
