So I finally handed in my MXit application, it is more than a little rough around the edges, but I’m happy with the things I’ve learned.
Thank you to the MXit guys for organising this competition, I really haven’t seen anything else like it in SA ( If anyone else has, please let me know 
). Even if I did use 1 month of my life for something thats going to get me no direct monetary gain… Wait, why was I thanking them again… ?
I’m dissapointed that I only found out about the competition a month in, especially when I think about all the cool features that were left to implement. But maybe its just as well, I’m supposed to be finishing my studies soon and I’m already behind.
I coded my client in c#. I thought that it would be a good pick because of the memory leak nightmares I’ve had building a largish c++ framework for processing video. I found that when there is a large number of classes and there are many possible interactions, it can be tough to track down those bugs. So good work to those Qt guys, I’m keen to see your app.
Java was another option, but I really don’t like it for desktop apps, and I know the language so its a bit boring. I went with with c# in the end because its semi cross platform with mono ( binary compatible but windows forms dont look great on linux ), I looked into GTK# and a Qt wrapper for .NET but decided on windows forms in the end. The other factor was that I didn’t know c#, so it was going to be an awesome opportunity to learn, I had fun with reflection and events, and went into logging and unit testing, even though those kinda died as the deadline came nearer.
Things got a bit messy near the end, the code needs some refactoring, but take a look when you get a chance. I’ll write another post sometime with details on what my system looks like from a high level. It would be great if anyone else would give an overview of how they decided to make things fit together, I would like to have a discussion about it.
