Programming Language for an accountant

[Michaels]

Hi there !

Being a recently qualified accountant, I intend to develop my own accounting system (not re-inventing the wheel but purely as a project for learning VB.Net)

I consulted with a Course Leader and he suggested this:

1. Learn ASP.NET (for building forms)
2. Learn VB.NET (coding those forms and controls)
3. Learn SQL (for database creation)

He also said that I should create web-application (wherever there is internet, I can do my work online) and "then" develop the Windows Application (.exe)

So my questions in this regard are:

Q1. Is the Course Leader's idea good for achieving the goal (creating my own plain accounting system, which can be accessed online and on windows too) ?

Q2. Can we build Excel forms for data-entry to SQL (excel for data-entry to directly SQL as storage) and use excel as retrieving tool (for report generation, such as Income statement and balance sheet) ?

Your comments are highly appreciated.


Thanks

 

[xenou]

Hi,
This sounds like a trick question since accountants, as general rule, wouldn't be learning .NET languages. That said, I would learn SQL first. It's the common currency of data-driven applications. From there if you want to build a web-driven app, you can produce it in ASP.NET, and if you don't want to run the app on a web server, you can use VB.NET instead. I wouldn't confuse Excel development with this at first - one thing at a time. You can always write Excel interfaces but probably that depends on having a good understanding of how the database works first.

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