This question is for Jminatel,

Here in NYC financial based industries mostly work Desktop or Windows based applications, also real time or standard client server solutions are mostly oriented to this platform, so it will be really useful to have a problem-design-solution book based in .NET 2.0 C# or VB.NET based in Windows applications. Have you consider including it into this series?

Thanks,


RickP./

RickP: Yes, we've been talking a lot about that lately. The trick has been, we haven't been able to come up with an application example that has universal appeal. In web programming, there's a fairly common set of user-facing functions that we can build the example around. Windows applications seem to us, to be more unique for each customer. So it's been hard to think of an example that would serve the dual purpose of showing good architecture and being reading to use.

Or, maybe we just have a limited imagination here. Rick, if you or anyone else want to give us an idea that would help jumpstart our thinking on this, please do. I know a lot of people here would love to hear it.

Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press
Blog: http://wroxblog.typepad.com/
Jim's Book of the week: No book this week - Donate to the Red Cross!

Well this is an interesting question… As programmer I used both Marco's books mostly to learn architecture to all levels, i.e. OO applied, or how to establish business and data layers, or how to replace datasets by entities and be aware of the benefits of mentioned way of working; also, how to apply master, personalization, and themes.

To get this learning I used some of the modules included in the sample solution, but since my applications are financial oriented I didn’t need to implement the modules of e-commerce or forums, these modules were useful for some programmers not for all of them. What I think was useful for all of us were the skills and knowledge of the framework 2.0 and VS 2005 applied to an entire solution.

An ideal Windows based solution has to have what most of the classic applications can have: user authentication, data entry, validations, master-detail or father-child forms, xml applied in client-server solutions, how to save many records in the DB using a single call (i.e. sp_xml_preparedocument), email services, reporting and interaction with Office, yet more advanced... web services, COM+ and use of third party assemblies…. Maybe networking programming… hey I didn’t say it was easy to do ;)

Remember the benefits of client-Server applications in time of processing; this maybe will help to find a proper sample.

My preferred solution can be a Personal Finance Application in which I can include all my expenses and income(s) and get a daily balance, also having something like debts schedule calculators and why not an investment projection plan or a report of how much interest will I pay for all my debts in the next month. Ok this solution will give these answers and you did it yourself!


Thanks,


Rickp

Yes, the usefulness of the modular approach is a good thing to remind me of. That definitely helps with the thinking on the Windows side. I've pointed out this thread to our VB and C# editor. I'm sure this will be useful to her as she looks for the right author with the right idea to make this happen. :)

Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press
Blog: http://wroxblog.typepad.com/
Jim's Book of the week: No book this week - Donate to the Red Cross!

I also write Windows Forms apps, and you can see my latest freeware application - it's an interactive debugger for an assembly language program that runs on an embedded processor. This is quite specialized in terms of the functionality, but the code is designed with components and reusability in mind. It uses the cool TextEditor component of the Sharp Develop project:

http://www.ericengler.com/pluto.aspx

I'll be porting my EmbeddedGNU IDE to C# later, and I'll support C language debugging. The C language is the most popular choice for embedded applications, but all my PC-side software will be in C#.

Here's another highly specialized application: an RPN programmable calculator. To be honest, I don't care for his GUI design too much, but I learned a lot about Windows Forms by studying his source code, and it really is a powerful concept:

http://www.personalmicrocosms.com/Pages/cspcalc.aspx

Eric

Eric,

Thanks! I'll take a look of both samples.

Rickp/.