For the first time in a good decade or so, it looks like I'll actually complete a coding project that I've started. Getting paid for it has certainly helped motivate me, and the new anxiety meds I'm on are actually helping with my concentration issues.

It's not quite 100% complete yet, as there's still a couple of reports to finish, but since the client hasn't told me exactly what info they want reported, I can't write them yet, but all the code to do it is already in place.

It wasn't a huge project, but it's the first time I've tried writing a proper Windows application and it was less hassle than I expected, and I learnt a lot in the process.

I was going to write a tool to migrate data from the spreadsheet they were using, but it's so disorganized (wrong data in columns, variation in formatting, etc) that it's next to impossible, so they're going to hire a kid do enter the data manually.

The (more or less) finished product:

{"name":"611250","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/f\/cf966ae8f0c51860dc98e35be5be0a6a.png","w":767,"h":587,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/c\/f\/cf966ae8f0c51860dc98e35be5be0a6a"}

{"name":"611251","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/e\/7e9f634e55ada30c710a38ae2db429a7.png","w":767,"h":588,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/e\/7e9f634e55ada30c710a38ae2db429a7"}

{"name":"611252","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/e\/3ebf29749d1ae9a3140a35a563edee33.png","w":767,"h":588,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/e\/3ebf29749d1ae9a3140a35a563edee33"}

All fake. I made up a sample database so I could test everything.

P.S. Can you tell I'm a programmer and not a designer?

Thanks.

FINALLY! I'm sick of filling in for your girlfriend.

If you ever need a pinch hitter, give me a call. xD

Nice work, Lenny. It's really quite easy to put together a simple forms application like that in .NET. I'm assuming it's .NET. The equivalent C++ would probably be horrendous.

When I first got my job (almost 12 years ago now?) I worked on an Access database that had forms built-in. Everything was coded using VBA, which was a neutered version of Visual Basic. Everything you thought you could do wasn't supported by the API... It was horrible. So thank your stars you're using whatever you're using.

Once I discovered the power of Unix-like command in college I became much more comfortable using them. I've spent the better part of a decade just creating simple Web forms for people to store data. There's very little actual logic involved aside from managing relationships between the data. This drives me crazy because given the chance I'm almost certain I could automate the forms using reflection in .NET (inspecting the structure of data types at run-time and generating forms to match).

I personally find that GUIs are a huge waste of resources, and Web forms aren't much better. The amount of work that goes into say adding a field or moving a field around is astronomical.

I want to experiment with using a simple text-editor for editing forms. The program would load the data, and based on the structure of the data output a form in plain text into a temporary file, and then load the file with a text editor. When the user exits the text editor the program would load in the text, parse the data inside of it based on the structure of the file that was generated (with special rules to understand multiline fields, etc., which the user would have to maintain while editing) and then save the result back.

Imagine if a record of data was loaded up into Vim in a multiline format. You could jump around to the interest fields, make edits, copy data to other files, etc. If you want to make a change you just edit the text in the appropriate place and save the file. Exit and boom, you're done. Want a new field? Just add it to the database or query or whatever. The program will see the new field and generate a new spot in the text file when viewing or editing the data. No need for expensive GUIs at all.

GUIs work very well for graphical data (obviously). Unfortunately, the only good part is the graphics. The UI part of a GUI is usually shit. Every program should have an extensible command line to make the most efficient use of the machine<->human interface possible.

/rant

Good work, though, Lenny. It's still a lot of fun hacking on a GUI (unless somebody else wrote it or you haven't touched it in 6 months).

Thanks. Yeah, it's .net. I'm loving it. I can tell they've put a lot of thought into the framework. I keep writing helper functions only to find afterwards that there's already a function that does what I want.

Keeping track of all the fields and their even handlers was the biggest challenge. I started with a single interface, and then towards the end I switched it to a tabbed interface, which caused all my event handlers to stop working, and I had to manually tell VS which ones to use.

Thanks. It is a C# WinForms project - my first one that isn't just a handful of lines of code.

As far as I can tell, there's practically no difference between the two now, except that you use OleDbConnections and OleDbDataAdapters instead of SqlDbConnections and SqlDataAdapters. You use the same SQL queries for both and then treat the data the same once you've read it from the data source.

Update: For those who are into pointless metrics, it's 1,959 lines of code.

They're a charity with only a few hundred members, so that's pretty unlikely. Even if every person in NZ with Tourette's was a member, there'd only be a few thousand people. I wasn't even expecting to get paid to do this, it was just an added bonus on top of the opportunity to have a project to work on and learn with.