[AngieLeigh]

I'm a second year programming student, and I'm doing a little bit of work on the side to help pay for school.
One job that I'm working on right now is to create an inventory system for a factory. It's a small factory so I'm not talking large scale. All they want is a station in the warehouse where they can input/update information, and a station in the office where they can read reports on the information. (Mainly just skid weights pertaining to a specific product ID). I already have a database set up with all of the tables/fields that I'll need, but now I can't decide whether to do the project as a C# program, or use a dynamic website. All I've had experience with in school has been windows forms (C#), xna gaming and asp.net. Although I am quite familiar with going through different tutorials if it is something that I am not familiar with.

My question is, how would you suggest I lay out this project? The factory has an intranet as well as their own domains if they're needed, so connections shouldn't be a problem.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[modi123_1]

... you took on a project, for cash, and are not sure how to get it done? I am afraid to see the database design!

If you are familiar with winforms then go that way. Heck one app with input/output and report options that can be installed on both pcs would be the most straight forward.

[AngieLeigh]

haha luckily the owner is a friend of mine so he's not expecting perfection

Thanks for the quick reply!

[tlhIn`toq]

Wow - We seem to be getting this rash of people asking:
"I don't know how to begin or design my project. Please help me."
Did D.I.C. get on some mailing list?
Makes responding easy.


[quote name='Naitryn' date='02 December 2011 - 12:10 PM' timestamp='1322849413' post='1500907']

AngieLeigh, on 02 December 2011 - 12:49 PM, said:

I'm not asking for the code, just guidance on how to do this.

Start with this article:
I don't want code, just some ideas/help on the logic because I'm lost.


[quote name='Naitryn' date='02 December 2011 - 12:10 PM' timestamp='1322849413' post='1500907']

AngieLeigh, on 02 December 2011 - 12:49 PM, said:

I have absolutely no idea how to begin this

Then you probably aren't ready to start developing projects from scratch and should go back to your book and tutorials and work on *learning* before jumping into *developing*. For now, just work on the lessons. Do a self-teaching book from cover to cover. Then consider writing a program. Don't try to create a useful working program to fit a need of yours (or a for-pay contract) as your introduction to coding project. When you are learning to code you don't know enough to code a program, let alone know how to engineer the architecture of a program. It would be like saying "I don't know how to read sheet music, or play an instrument. I think I'll write a 3 act opera as my first learning experience." I don't say this to be mean. We've seen lots of new coders take this approach and we know it doesn't work. Trying to design your own programs before you understand the basics of the code language you've chosen just leads to problems, frustrations, and 'swiss-cheese' education (lots of holes).

---

Resources, references and suggestions for new programmers. - Updated Nov 2011

---

Spoiler

The stages of asking for homework help on a forum

Finding answers to specific problems:
Sometimes just knowing where to look can make all the difference. Google is your friend.
Search with either "C#" or "MSDN" as the first word: "MSDN Picturebox", "C# Custom Events", "MSDN timer" etc.
How to do a good search that will get you targeted answers.

Once you have that MSDN page that describes the function, you may not be familiar with out to actually get useful information from that page. There is a LOT of data there. So what is the important parts? Read this guide to reading the MSDN.

Don't think you are the first person to ask a question. Try a search on this site to see if someone has already brought up this problem. Also, as soon as you post your question go to the bottom of the updated page: You will see where the system has already analyzed your question and tried to find similar threads for the same question, so check those links out.

But honestly, just typing away and seeing what pops up in Intellisense is going to make your self-education take 20 years. You can learn by trying to reverse engineer the language through banging on the keyboard experimentation - or you can learn by doing the tutorials and following a good "How to learn C#" book. There are so many great "How do I build my first application" tutorials on the web... There are dozens of "Learn C# in 21 days", "My first C# program" type books at your local book seller or even public library.

Beginner:
C# Fundamentals: Development for absolute beginners
Build a Program Now! in Visual C# by Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-2542-5 is a terrific book that has you build a Windows Forms application, a WPF app, a database application, your own web browser.

Martyr2's mega project ideas list is a great place to start on developmental projectst that you can learn from; rather than trying to make something complex like a game as a self-teaching tool {that never works for anyone}

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

D.I.C. C# Resource page Start here
Intro to C# online tutorial then here...
C# control structures then here.
MSDN Beginner Developer video series
MSDN video on OOP principals, making classes, constructors, accessors and method overloading
MSDN Top guideline violations, know what to avoid before you do it.
Design patterns as diagrams

I hate sending people to another site when we have such good tutorials here, but this series shouldn't be overlooked.
Programming OOP in C# - Part 1
Programming OOP in C# - Part 2
Programming OOP in C# - Part 3
Programming OOP in C# - Part 4
Programming OOP in C# - Part 5

Writing a text file is always one of the first things people want to do, in order to store data like high-scores, preferences and so on.
Writing a text file tutorial.
Reading a text file tutorial.

Have you seen the 500+ MSDN Code Samples? They spent a lot of time creating samples and demos. It seems a shame to not use them.

Intermediate:
The tutorials below walk through making an application including inheritance, custom events and custom controls, object serialization and more.
Bulding an application - Part 1
Building an application - Part 2
Quick and easy custom events
Separating data from GUI - PLUS - serializing the data to XML
WPF version (WPF-MVVM data binding)
Passing values between forms/classes
Decouple your multi-threaded work from the GUI so forms don't hang

Working with environmental variables
'Why do we use delegates?' thread
And everyone always wants to connect to a database, right out of the gate so Database tutorials right here on DIC

C# Cookbooks
Are a great place to get good code, broken down by need, written by coding professionals. You can use the code as-is, but take the time to actually study it. These professionals write in a certain style for a reason developed by years of experience and heartache.

Everyone:
Debugging tutorial
Debugging tips
Debugging in detail
Great debugging tips
It still doesn't work, article

I urge you to work through the C# learning series here on DIC, and to work a self-teaching book from cover to cover before you even think about designing your own applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your productivity, Microsoft press, ISBN 0-7356-2640-5 Has many, many great, real-world tips that I use all the time.

These are just good every-day references to put in your bookmarks.
MSDN C# Developers Center with tutorials
Welcome to Visual Studio
Free editions of Visual Studio 2010

Let me also throw in a couple tips:

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
  
  
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
  
  
• You aren't paying for variable names by the byte. So instead of variables names of a, b, c go ahead and use meaningful names like Index, TimeOut, Row, Column and so on. You should avoid 'T' for the timer. Amongst other things 'T' is commonly used throughout C# for Type and this will lead to problems. There are naming guidelines you should follow so your code confirms to industry standards. It makes life much easier on everyone around you, including those of us here to help. If you start using the standards from the beginning you don't have to retrain yourself later.
  
  
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  
  Spoiler

  
  

  btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  FormMain_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();
  }
  

  
  
  
• I strongly suggest installing VMware or some other virtualization technology on your development PC so you can create a couple virtual computers for testing. This would allow you to debug and test inside: WinXP32, XP64, Vista, Win7x32, Win7x64... etc. without having to actually have 5 physical PC's. Visual Studio will let you send the debug directly into one of these virtual machines so you can watch it operate, check its variables, see the crashes and so on just as if it were debugging on your real machine.
  
  
• This can't be stressed enough in today's world of cell phone messaging:
  Don't use txt/sms/leet/T9 speak like: u no, u r, dnt no wut i m do-n, coz, al gud, b4, ny1, and so on like this guy:
  
  dis not b d'hood dawg... You are sitting at a real keyboard with a real monitor, not a cell phone. You are not here texting your high school posse to come to your kegger after their shift at Taco Bell. You are here asking for help from senior coding professionals who graciously donate their valuable time to helping the next generation of coders with their chosen craft. Please try to show them, yourself and the industry some respect by writing at least at an eighth grade level. (IE: English not ebonics or SMS, real words, capitalization, punctuation and so on). If you can't take your own problem/question seriously enough to write like an adult, then why would you expect anyone else to take it seriously?

[AngieLeigh]

Wow someone's cheerful today...

First off, please don't quote me saying something that I didn't. Second, I'm sorry I didn't clarify in my post that I'm only looking for an opinion from someone who has been in my position before. I have no problem coding it, and I have the knowledge base for it. The knowledge that I mentioned in my post were just the ones that I learned in school... not the ones that I have had to teach myself. As I said, I am quite familiar with tutorials and my bookcase is full of coding books and reference guides.

I understand how you can get aggravated by noobs coming here and wanting your genius skills for their homework, but I would much rather do it myself and understand how it works so that I don't have to rely on someone else.

Please, if you're not going to be helpful in your replies, don't reply. That should be another 'rule' for posting here... oh wait... it kind of is. You might want to read this article:
New To Dream.In.Code - FAQ

[webunisa]

if this is a small company..

u can go for C#.. make an application with all requirements and connect it with your designed database
the company can share this app with their employees and they get the results


good luck for your project.

[AngieLeigh]

Thanks webunisa!