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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...

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 c...

Recently I've become involved with projects that require C#. Since I've developed an affinity for Object Oriented Programming and the use of Classes, C# has become rather appealing to me. Without getting into too much historical detail, C# was developed by Microsoft around the year 2000. It was meant to be an improvement upon C++, hence the sharp “#” symbol, indicating a sort of stacked set of four plus symbols “++++”. A number of things in C# stand out with me. Especially the ease of implementation of graphics and database interfaces. As well as how easy it is to work with objects and classes. I can think of a number of programs I've been wanting to write over the years which C# may do quite nicely. One thing that's been holding me back on most of my development projects is the lack of ability to cross compile between different Operating Systems. But apparently there are a number of resources available for both Mac and Linux that might get me to my cross-p...