Monday, March 31, 2014

A Lot of Rambling About a C# Project

Hello everyone!

About a month ago a friend of mine told me a local company was hiring for a software developer, and they had told them I would be stopping by to talk to them. Unfortunately, my friend didn't really know what the company did exactly or what coding language they used for developing software. I went in and talked to the company and got a bit more information on what they do. They use C# for all their software development, which I had no experience with. It is an Object Oriented Programming language like Unrealscript, so at least I has some knowledge of how the language was supposed to work. Long story short, the guy I talked to said he'll put together a small project for me to try out and see if we're compatible. While I'm waiting for that project I went ahead and started learning what I could about C#. I'm nowhere near being proficient in it yet, but I've learned quite a bit. Hopefully enough to work out the project when it arrives.

So, Winds of Commerce is on hold until I learn if I will be getting the job. It saddens me because I really want to finish it, but all my free time has been spent going through tutorials and creating some basic programs with C# to work into more advanced stuff.

One project I'm working on is a meal list/meal generator. How it works is you create a master list of different meals(like dinners and such) with optional ingredients and notes. Once you have some meals in your master list you can either manually add them to a smaller meal list(for instance to make a dinner plan for the week), or you have the option to automatically generate how ever many meals you need, or both.

For example: if you knew you wanted to have burgers next week you could manually add burgers to the list, then generate the other 6 meals randomly to make the full 7 days of meals.

After you have your finalized list of meals you can then print them off using several different formats. You can choose to just print the meal names, print just the ingredients, or a all the meals and their ingredients. If you choose to print just the ingredients it will compile all of the ingredients from all the meals into one list, combining duplicate ingredients into one with the combined quantities. On the other hand, if you print meals and ingredients it will print each meal with the individual ingredients directly underneath the meal name. This way you can see exactly how much of what goes into that particular meal. I guess I should add one in for printing the notes off, but I forgot about that until just now...

Enough rambling for now, I'll go over some of the issues I ran into while trying to create this once I'm satisfied with it. Here are some images of the meal generator:

Main Page
Adding a new meal
Viewing the notes
Viewing the ingredient list
The selected meal list randomly generated
Print options
Printed with the "Both" option
Printed with the "Ingredients Only" option