Coding Tracker

This project has been completed by 234 users

This app should be very similar to the Habit Logger you’ve previously completed. It will serve the purpose of reinforcing what you’ve learned with a bit of repetition and building on that knowledge with slightly more challenging requirements.

This time you’ll have to deal with the complexity of handling dates and times, which is a real challenge in any application. You’ll also be using your first external library. Often in professional environments programmers don’t reinvent the wheel and save time by using public solutions provided by other coders. That’s the beauty of the internet. You have access to an amazing coding community!

In the first app we also didn’t have requirements for coding organization. This time you’ll have to use Separation of Concerns, one of the most important principles in modern programming. We recommend you go through our Object Oriented Programming Crash Course prior to completing this project so you're better equipped to make your code more organized.

Requirements

This application has the same requirements as the previous project, except that now you'll be logging your daily coding time.

To show the data on the console, you should use the Spectre.Console library.

You're required to have separate classes in different files (i.e. UserInput.cs, Validation.cs, CodingController.cs)

You should tell the user the specific format you want the date and time to be logged and not allow any other format.

You'll need to create a configuration file called appsettings.json, which will contain your database path and connection strings (and any other configs you might need).

You'll need to create a CodingSession class in a separate file. It will contain the properties of your coding session: Id, StartTime, EndTime, Duration. When reading from the database, you can't use an anonymous object, you have to read your table into a List of CodingSession.

The user shouldn't input the duration of the session. It should be calculated based on the Start and End times

The user should be able to input the start and end times manually.

You need to use Dapper ORM for the data access instead of ADO.NET. (This requirement was included in Feb/2024)

Follow the DRY Principle, and avoid code repetition.

Don't forget the ReadMe explaining your thought process.

Resources

If you have learned the basics of C# following the C# Foundations article, and completed the Habit Logger project, you should know all the basic techniques needed to complete this project. Here’s a list of extra resources you might need:

Spectre Console documentation.

Dapper Tutorial.

Tips

It's up to you the order in which you'll build, but we recommend you do it in this order: configuration file, model, database/table creation, CRUD controller (where the operations will happen), TableVisualisationEngine and finally: validation of data.

Sqlite doesn't support dates. We recommend you store the datetime as a string in the database and then parse it using C#. You'll need to parse it to calculate the duration of your sessions.

Don't forget the user input's validation: Check for incorrect dates. What happens if a menu option is chosen that's not available? What happens if the users input a string instead of a number? Remember that the end date can't be before the start date.

Challenges

Add the possibility of tracking the coding time via a stopwatch so the user can track the session as it happens.

Let the users filter their coding records per period (weeks, days, years) and/or order ascending or descending.

If you already have a bit of experience with programming, we highly recommend you get into the habit of writing unit tests for a few methods in your project. Any method that outputs data and doesn't talk to a database (those are tested in integration tests) can be unit tested. A good example is any method that deals with validation and testing your data-retrieving methods with different filters. Here's a quick tutorial.

AI Challenge

This is a slightly more advanced project but it taps into the future of programming: Artificial intelligence. Can you let the users add records using their voice? For this you'll use Azure's Language Services. You can find a step-by-step tutorial below:

Creating a Desktop App

If you have watched the entire C# Foundation course, you have already created a Math Game Desktop app using the amazing .NET MAUI. It will be great practice to build a desktop Coding Tracker App with the same functionality you’ve created for this console app. There will be some challenges, especially if you want to create a timer, but you’ve already got all the skills necessary. And remember, if you get stuck, reach out on our Discord community and we will help!