Award winning bookkeeping program

A shrink wrapped Windows Desktop program for bookkeeping created for the Dutch market. I did the design, architecture and programming of this app. At it's time it was a refreshing new approach to accounting and got thousands of users. The goal was to make it as easy as possible for non specialists to keep their books up-to-date.

The program received several awards from the Dutch computer press. It's created using C# and other dot.net technologies. For storing data it uses MS SQL Server and for the User Interface, DevExpress libraries were used. DevExpress made it very easy to adapt screens to your own preferences. Extensive reporting is an important feature of this product.

Bank Statements in the bookkeeping program

From a single codebase, four different versions were created. Two invoicing only and two bookkeeping versions both in a regular and a pro version. During installation it would ask for a serial number. When the user entered the serial number, the installer program would contact a webservice that I also created using ASP.net running on MS Azure, where the serial number would be checked against a SQL Server database. If found, the webservice returns a config file that contains the version type of the product. This config file with an XML syntax, is signed with a Private Key on the server. The desktop program has the public key and wil check the validity of the config file every time the program starts. It is therefore impossible to change the config file because this would invalidate the PKI signature.

Keywords:
C#, Dot-net, DevExpress UI components, SQL Server, Azure, ASP.net, XML, SOAP, PKI