Welcome reader,

This post is a small break from the programming basics serie. I’m going to talk about a real life project I will talk about in this blog. It will be an open source project, which will be accessible from my GitHub account profile.  Before going talking more about the basics, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about what could be achieved when we will put everything that was learned and mastered here in this blog.

You have to create a software application which will store a large number of clients. These clients will make orders and they have to save in a database which must be available a least 95% of the time. Sometimes, special orders takes more time than usual before they come in, when this happens, you can either make it so that when it happens, you automatically send emails to users or u make a query in the database to select users and then send the email. For emails in this situation, you should have templates which would just receive dynamic data so the user of the software has less manipulation to do.

For users, the fun would be to have a self-contained mobile application . What I mean is this:

• sign in into the app with all our information.
• Be able to see whats going on in our account.

Moreover, while using a mobile device, such as a phone or a tablet, users would have notification of what going on. Even if emails are sent to the email account, it would even better to select what kind of feedback from the company a customer would like to receive.

In this example, we have a software application which must use a database. The information must be available at least 95 % of the time, so the fail rate has to be really low. The information on the orders must be available online so the users can access it from his mobile device with their app.

In our dev world, there are many ways to complete a task. What I recommend is usually go with what you know so you’ll know what you’re doing while you are doing it. But, in a realm in which things move faster than when oneself blinks his eyes, I think it would be a benefit to try out new technologies in order to gain experience.

For this kind of problem, I have chosen to use:

1. C# with the object oriented paradigm
2. Windows Phone (Universal App)
3. The Android Operating System
4. Reactive Extension (Rx)
5. LINQ
6. The Firebase database

Honestly, I haven’t really experimented the technologies #2, 4 and 6. But I’m not going into this series before we’re ready to do it. So during that time, I’ll get my hands dirty. In the developers community, when someone says getting their hands dirty, it is meant as programming. In order to understand something, we really need to experiment by ourselves, even if the code makes sense to you, I strongly suggest that you at least copy paste it into your IDE and run the application to see how it works on your machine. What would be best is to modify the code, play with it until you truly understand what’s going on.

On the topic of the open source project, I’m going to take you step by step in my solution. This is going a more advanced serie, but bear no fear, if there things that you don’t understand, post comments and I’ll answer you to the best of my knowledge. At first, we will setup our database before going into coding. Then, we’ll design our software application for the company. Then design our mobile app. Afterwards, when the designs are completed, I’ll explain the more complex parts of my implementation, but not all of it. You’ll be able to find the project on my GitHub. Don’t worry, it’ll be commented!

Kevin

• C# & F#