My first big project (.NET) - and technologies used.

In the summer of 2017, together with my former finance manager, I began to design an internal recharge system for the company.
The choice was WPF for Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/wpf/getting-started/walkthrough-my-first-wpf-desktop-application) using the old .NET, and an MS SQL Database.

We began to learn, exercise and think about the tools to use:
Our inspiration was: https://www.iamtimcorey.com/
1. IDE: Visual Studio Community 2017
2. WPF - for the visual part, front-end
3. ORM - Dapper - I think this is the best discovery ever! Tim speaks about this in his Videos.
https://www.iamtimcorey.com/blog/137806/entity-framework 

Please, check out his videos, about SQL, C# and lots of serious tutorials and courses.
 (https://stackexchange.github.io/Dapper/)
See also: https://dapper-tutorial.net/
4. MS SQL - I needed to review my SQL knowledge. Did a lot of exercises, and build many stored procedures for the application - dapper maps the entities to the data returned by those stored procedures, and I also used SP to insert and update entity data. Even if this was very time consuming in the beginning, proves to be very efficient and goal oriented.
5. lots of company data about expenses and the algorithm to create allocation keys - business logic designed together with Finance Manager.

The journey was hard. It took me probably 1 year to really get some speed, and show something to my Finance Manager colleague.

Luckily, I had my finance background, to understand the process we tried to automate, as there was a working excel macro/formula model as well used before the application.

But, I needed to fix my knowledge of C# (also using MVVM the first time for WPF) and SQL/Dapper. This meant weekly 2-3 hours of coding for 1 year to get some traction.
Main source for C# was google and Tim Corey, and my big discoveries were:

• lists/collections of items 
• LINQ and the foreach 
• breaking down the tasks to smaller chunks and functions
• writing a services class to export lists to excel using OpenXML
• first steps in async/await

A special challenge was how to integrate the good old WinForm control ReportViewer into WPF and MVVM. I will detail these maybe in another blog post.