Budget App - Part 1

One thing I seem to find a hassle is conjuring up some sort of realistic application to apply all the really cool technologies and techniques to.

I figure that something that I'm really bad at is budgeting. Whether this is due to my wife (I hope she doesn't read this) or it's just me no one will ever know. A small budget application was in order and considering that I actually want to use this soon I thought I'd whip a little budget up and then slowly enhance it with some of the technologies I haven't had the luck of working with yet, such as WCF. I'll apply development techniques such as Test Driven Development (TDD) as much as I can and let you know what sort of issues I face.

Here's a snap-shot of the little application.


So what features/technologies have I used include:
ADO.Net Entity FrameworkLinqDevExpress web controls v2009 vol2

Data Access
Having used the Linq-SQL before I thought I'd initially have a play around with the ADO.Net Entity Framework for this app. I must say though (without knowing all the nuances of the Entity Framework) that I prefer Linq-SQL.

using ( budgetEntities = new BudgetEntities() )
{
    spendings = ( from s in budgetEntities.SpendingSet
                  where s.DateSpent.Month == DateTime.Now.Month && s.DateSpent.Year == DateTime.Now.Year
                  orderby s.DateSpent descending, s.Timestamp descending
                  select new SpendingView
                  {
                      SpendingId = s.SpendingId,
                      Description = s.Description,
                      Amount = s.Amount,
                      DateSpent = s.DateSpent,
                      Category = s.MthCategory.Category.CategoryId
                  } ).ToList();
}

Here I am directly accessing the Data Context from the UI. This will be changed in the next post. What pattern will be used I'm not entirely sure, but it will definitely involved WCF.

User Interface
I've decided to try out the Developer Express suit of user controls for this. I've used others in the past but they just didn't cut the cake and considering that DevEx are always winning first place for all the 3rd Party Control categories I figured they'd be the best bet.

The controls that I used were the ASPXGridView, the ASPxTabControl, the ASPxRoundPanel and the ASPxCallbackPanel.



I started out using their v2009 vol1 release, but have since upgraded it to v2009 vol2.

Enjoy!

TFK