View iPod Nano songs without iTunes, C# Express, Part 3

So now that we know what we are going to build, we need to determine what technologies we are going to use, and what our software design will be.

Technology

The technology we'll use is C# Express. I'm not going to bore you with all the reasons why I choose to use C# instead of VB.NET. I have a VB.NET background myself, but for the past few years I've focused mostly only C# (mostly due to recent contracts), and now I'm simply more comfortable with it. To be honest I think both have their good points - but I'll save the comparisons for a different post.

Software Design

I'm not going to show you class diagrams or sequence diagrams or any other kind of grams; I do enough of that on the job and it's really not necessary for something this small. For enterprise projects in the work environment you should definitely create at least a class diagram, but for this I'm just going to describe the components.

ITunesDBLib
This is the first component we need to create. It is a class library assembly and its primary function is to read data from the iTunesDB file. It represents the communication 'engine' for the iTunes database. Within it we will create the objects that represent the song elements in the iTunesDB file. We will look at the actual code for this component in the next post.

IPodBrowserExampleUI
This is the UI component. It is a windows forms exe that will use the ITunesDBLib class library to get data and display it. It will also have functions to play and extract songs to the computer.

Together these two components will be the entirety of our application.

In the next post, we'll create the ITunesDBLib class library, and you'll get to see some actual code.