Last semester I sat working at my desk and I looked at my bookshelf and realized that I had no idea which books I owned and which ones I didn't. I also had been wanting to learn a new programming language, and decided to write a program to keep track of my books (and later, DVD's). Since I get Visual Studio 2008 for free from school, I picked C# as the language, and MyLibrary was born.
This semester I was able to completely overhaul the broken, not well written program for a new class at BYU, the "unclass", where the topic is picked by the student. Mine is C#, obviously.
MyLibrary is completely light-weight, and at this point fully-functional. It stores the entire library in an XML file anywhere on the users machine. Many other implementations store these types of libraries in SQL, but I wanted it to be a standalone executable that the user doesn't have to install.
It also allows the user the option to automatically search the Amazon website using the UPC/ISBN (through the Amazon Web-services API) based on one row or the entire database.
In addition, the user can scan the barcodes in from a barcode scanner or a Cuecat scanner (we had to use one for my VBA class, and I thought it'd be fun to implement it here) and have the software find the information for them, limiting user-input.
There are still bugs of course, and I don't claim it to be the best written software, but it's been fun to write. I'll post the executable when it's more complete then it is now.
It also has a really basic stats page:
*sidenote - the stats page has a pie chart that the screen print doesn't pick up for some reason. Odd.
1 comment:
I'd be interested in the source for this just to have an xml example and an example that actually puts pictures on buttons. Leave a reply here if you can't find another way to contact me. Thanks
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