State of the time

The functionality of my time tracking application is stating to shape up.

At the moment, you can...

• Fill in task details and track time spent


• Compile a list of tasks and their details (automatic)


• Save and load task lists


• Generate a report of the tasks

It's looking good. Very good actually.
I will probably work out some bugs in the time saving and add a tray icon and some functionality to it and release some kind of a test version for the curious to look at.


The saving and loading was easy to implement, thanks to .NET's good use of XML. The tasks are saved into a DataSet inside the app, so I just pop out the XML from the DataSet with WriteXml() to save and use ReadXml() to open. Easy!

Another very nifty feature about XML is XSLT. You can use XSLT to transform XML documents into other documents. And as .NET supports XSLT... there couldn't be an easier way to transform the data from the DataSet into HTML other than using XSLT to transform the XML data.

I've worked with XSLT quite much at my current internship job. I've done various XML to HTML translations and one which converts XML into plain text.


If you don't know what XML or XSLT are, here's some links to get you started:
W3Schools XML tutorials
W3Schools XSLT tutorials

W3C XML page
W3C XSL/XSLT page

If you're using .NET, check MSDN's articles about System.Xml namespace.