C# – Programming Database Driven Windows Forms Desktop Apps

• Visual Studio
• Basic familiarity with Windows Forms
• Basic C# Skills (loops, conditional statements, very basics of OOP etc.)
• Basic knowledge of Database terminology

Description

I created this course with a C# beginner in mind. Someone, who knows the basic C# concepts, and knows his way around loops, conditional statements, arrays, and very basics of object oriented programming, but never really had a chance to incorporate any of it with a relational Database project. If that describes you, then this is definitely a course for you.

For this course, I decided to use a Microsoft Access database, as that is a common database for small business users around the world. Now, full disclosure: we won’t be creating any earth-shattering application and there will be a lot of room for improving our code. What we ARE going to be doing is LEARNING how to use with C# with MS Access, and we’ll use a simple, but fairly common scenario – a small books database app.
The goal of this course is threefold

• The first, is to show you how things work
• Second, help you understand how things work under the hood.
• And third, to drill the basics so that they become second nature to you.

This course concentrates solely on using the Access database with C We will use Windows Forms as the user interface and we’ll use form events to code the application logic. This way, we won’t get distracted with million other little things that come into play for the truly well-designed commercial app. As I said, the goal here is to LEARN the basics and to RETAIN the knowledge.

From my own experience, from the beginner’s point of view, nothing is worse than taking a course to learn the basics, only to suddenly be introduced to dozens of advanced real-world concepts, that completely derail you from learning what you came here to learn in the first place…which is, the basics. What good is it for a beginner to watch someone build a professional-grade app when three-quarters of the stuff presented goes right over your head? Not in this course.

However, with that being said, if you go through this course, and if you code along, I am absolutely sure that in the end, you will have a great foundation to build on, and you will be able to move to more sophisticated applications and coding styles.

The course consists of several sections. The first few sections introduce the basic concepts, such as connecting to the database, browsing through the records, binding database fields with form objects in the windows forms, and other core concepts related to databases as well as windows forms.

The first project is a small Data Entry application. This project does not include a database yet. We will create a simple data entry form and explore few properties and form objects. This project serves as a simple introduction or a refresher, and if you are familiar with the basics of windows forms and the concept of properties and events, then you can safely skip this project. However, there still may be a few things you could learn from this project, as we will be working with a timer, keypress events, mouse events, and form elements in the run time.

The second project will be a mix of theory and practice. We’ll spend a few minutes going through some basic theory where we will discuss some basic database concepts, SQL commands, and C# database objects and after each lesson, I will demonstrate the practical use of each of the concepts.

In our third project, we start putting the theory into practical use. It’ll be just a simple project that loads data into our form from one table, but we will see in action how to connect to the database and how to select records from the table. Ir will also be a little departure from previous examples, as we will use a different database.