Today's application is meant to be a simple, yet useful, application for people to use out on the town. This is an application that a couple of my friends recommended as a good beginner's introduction application to programming for the .NET Compact Framework. One thing I really like about it is that there is nothing to get in the way of a new developer's understanding of what is going on in this application. Everything is direct and straight-forward.

If you have ever eaten out with a large group of friends and wanted to split the tip, then you probably know how much of a challenge this can be. It seems trivial at first glance, but there is a decent set of variable inputs, and another good size set of outputs. All of which are interrelated. But that is the past, now you have Mobile Tipper to take care of the hard work for you.

Mobile Tipper

There's not a whole lot going on with the UI. It is still clean and simple. I have colored the output fields in a light yellow color, and I have added an icon to the top right of the screen for decoration. Also, notice we are formatting our outputs, and allowing users to enter '%' and '$' characters in the inputs. This is a nice touch of polish that users appreciate. The icon in the top right is also the icon for the applications and the forms themselves. (I couldn't take it; I decided to give the application, a famous light blue color to give it a little life.)

There's a lot of fields, and this is technically a mobile data entry application. So we want to enable our users to enter data as easily as possible. That's why we are using editable comboboxes, and allowing users to enter '%' and '&' characters. The comboboxes are pre-populated with a likely set of inputs users will want to use.

One thing I did also to help with data entry is I assign tab orders to all my input controls, and marked all my output controls TabStop properties as false so they would be skipped over.

I implemented a Tip class that handles all the math calculations, and so on. And I created NumericTextBoxes and NumericComboBoxes that only allow numeric data to be entered. Again try to make end users lives easier.

You might be wondering what my secret is to handling the character's '%' and '$', it is the trusty String.Replace() method. I replace both of those characters with String.Empty's. :D

     return Decimal.Parse(this.Text.Replace("$", string.Empty).Replace("%", string.Empty));

I came close to skinning this application with some kind of butler them skin. Basically a white and black theme with a little bowtie band somewhere across the top, or middle with a watermarked jacket front in the application form's background. But decided it probably wouldn't end up looking like it does in my head.

Download executable: mobileTipper.cab

Download Source Code: mobileTipper.zip

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Tomorrow will be our tenth application, and mark us at 1/3 complete. So far I have managed to design, create, publish, and explain a new and different .NET Compact Framework application everyday. My goal is to do it everyday this month. Your support really makes a difference so keep it coming!