schenz

POS Application Catch-up

2/14/2006:

This is going to be my programming blog. I am looking to start one of two projects, and would like some help in deciding what to do.

My first idea is a POS type application. I have been very dissatisfied with what is available in small markets in this area. I think I could build a fairly advanced program, and make it affordable for the small business.

My second idea actually came from my mother-in-law. She would like a program to track medical history for her parents. It would have all the general medical information, and be able to track medications, etc. My father-in-law also has diabities, so I thought I could include tracking information for this as well.

I would like some feedback on what you think should be done. I'll post updates with my project here to let you know the sort of problems I run into, and how I solve them. I would also be happy to provide free BETAS to anyone interested in helping me debug it.

2/16/2006:

I have received a few comments off of the blog asking what a POS Type application is, so here is an explination.

POS stands for Point of Sale. This type of application is used at restaurants, grocery stores, shopping centers, or any other type of business where a transaction occurs with the customer paying for the transaction at the time of the sale.

In this type of application we would need to design an Administration and Reporting portion to maintain products, suppliers, prices, inventory, etc. Then there would be the actual sale portion where a person "rings up" a sale by either entering a SKU or scanning either the UPC bar code, or a custom barcode. The sale would then be paid for and added to the database for reporting.

This would be a much more ambitious project than the medical history, but there would be a larger demand for such a product.

If you have any more questions, please post comments here.

2/19/2006:

It appears that there is more interest in a POS application, than in a medical history/tracking application.

I am guessing that the reason for this is that people who have visited see a POS application as more of a business application, and the Medical application more of a hobyist app.

I promise to do whichever one gets more votes, but I would like to also state that there is probably more of an untapped market in Medical Applications at this time. My mother-in-laws idea of a medical history tracking application may start as a personal sort of project (and be marketable in that arena), but it also would have the potential of growing if medical professionals see reports people bring in and hanve an interest in putting terminals in each patient room to bring up history for ecach patient at the time of the visit rather than suffling all the paperwork that I see them suffle right now.

Of course there are legal issues that would need to be researched in creating a program directed to medical professionals here in the United States with legislature such as HIPA, but that does not mean that it cannot be done...

Again, please leave your comments and ideas on which sort of application you would like to see. Also, please expand on the reason why.

3/1/2006:

It appears that we're going to be doing a POS style application, but now we need to determine what we're going to code in. It is going to be in VB.NET, but now we need to decide if It's going to use VS.NET 2003, which I have, or if VB.NET 2005 Express (can't swing buying the full thing yet....).

After that we need to decide how we're going to store data. I'm pretty sure that we'll be using SQL Server (MSDE or Express) depending on which version of the framework I end up using.

Please post some feedback on what you would like to see.

3/14/2006:

This project will be written in Visual Studio 2005 as I have acquired it now. We will be using VB.NET, and I will also be playing with the Architect projects available for this as well.

I will attempt to post my complete experience using these tools as well, as I have not been completely satisfied by the resources available online. These tools look very good for designing and architecting an application, but we need better resources on how to use them in the real world.

If anyone knows of a really good resource please add a comment to this post to share with the community.

3/31/2006:

I have been doing some work, and have decided that the Architect tools are over my head at this point. So, I have created two of the first three Project Specification Documents. The first part of the project will be to get a basic working Admin, basic working Order Entry Application, and the base classes that will be used.

I believe that the first phase will be to create the Base Classes. I have named this project POS Base Classes. You may download the documentation here. These classes represent the database that I have created. I will need to create a Visio Diagram as well for posting for reference.

Next, we will work on the Admin for the application. The documentation I have right now is really basic, and will be added to before coding begins. Download the documentation from here.

Please download the documentation, and see what you think of it. Please post comments, and suggestions so we may look at making those before beginning to code.

4/7/2006:

I have created the Database Diagram in Visio, and that prompted a modification in the POS Base Classes documentation.

You may download the Visio Diagram from here.

The modified Documentation for POS Base Classes is here.