Using external libraries in C# to make program development easier

-

I've been working on a project for about two weeks to help me handle customers and invoices.

Originally it was going pretty well until I got to the point of adding invoice functionality. I had already added customer management but the idea of adding invoicing to my existing mess of code didn't seem too appealing.

I thought about it for a bit and realized it would be really nice if I could build simple external components and add them to my program as needed. That way I could keep major parts of the program separate. This would allow me better organization and management of my code. So I started exploring the idea of external Dynamic Link Libraries or DLLs.

I did a bit of research of ways to add external libraries and the option I decided to use would allow me to write libraries for my program without the need of any source code from the main program.

So I wound up scrapping what I had already done and I wrote a main program to handle some primary functions. Then I created a contact management library the the main program loads when it runs.

It turned out to be easier than I thought. One really cool feature was the ability of the main program to pass objects and classes to the library, in essence, exposing only specific functions in the main program to the library.

As long as I maintain persistence in how database, printing and other primary functions are accessed I wouldn't have to worry about those things when I wrote a new component as they're already taken care of.

This eliminates the worry of, “How am I going to implement these tedious but necessary things when I have an idea for a new component?” I can focus on what I want the component to do.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm a proponent of Object Oriented Programming, and here's why.

-
Image
Recently I started a somewhat involved project that should make it much easier for me to design web pages: The last time I worked a large project it became increasingly difficult to manage all the code as the project grew. But as I’ve come to adopt classes and objects it has become much easier to implement and manage code. I’m use to writing large chunks of code consisting mainly of variables, loops and functions. I usually try to organize this code by separating different types of functions into different files: I still end up with a mess of functions. Some functions only being used once. And a mass of code I have to sift through to figure out how some variable is being used (or misused). One thing I love about objects and classes is the organization. If I have a range of variables associated to only one purpose then I can use an object related to a purpose to store specific properties for very specific functions. For example with mouse tracking I do som...
Read more

Wrapping up my first C# project.

-
Image
I've wanted a desktop database program that I could customize for some time now. Actually there have been a number of programs I've wanted that require a database. But since Microsoft Access is a bit costly and Open Office has yet to release good documentation on programming their "Base" software I've been out of luck. Recently I've been learning C# well enough that I decided to dive into this project to see if I could do it. Turns out that I CAN! I've found C# to be really easy to pick up. As a result of my study efforts, I developed a rudimentary database engine and a contacts program that implements this engine. I found a bogus contacts list CSV file on the internet and wrote a simple import function so I could experiment with my database. So all these contacts are BOGUS (or at least they should be). Once I had the primary database function set up in the engine I could write an "add-on" library that the engine incorporates into itself a...
Read more