It was my first development assignment once the Technical Engineering degree was finished. It is an order for a family-run SME of home sales, and they needed several portable point of sale terminals, using PDAs with Windows Mobile operating system, which allowed to print purchase tickets from portable bluetooth printers. At the beginning of each day each terminal was updated with all the route data, customers and products connecting the PDA to a server, and at the end of each day each terminal dumped the data of the sales made and products sold to the same server.

To program the application for PDAs the language used was C#, which at that time was the most recommended and advanced when developing Windows Mobile applications. The system also used an SQLite database to temporarily store data in the PDAs, and I had to completely develop the driver for the Zebra Bluetooth printer, since Windows Mobile did not have any library or driver to print documents in any type Printer

The server consisted of 3 separate parts: the user interface, the database and the ActiveX control to detect and update the data from the PDAs. I also developed the graphical interface in C #, since it was originally designed to work with Windows XP, and from this you could create users (vendors) and each user could modify their sales routes, their items and their customers. You could also consult the sales made, and the system showed sales statistics, and basic accounting functions (VAT passed, benefits, more and less productive items per route, total sales per day, week, month and year, etc. ,,,). All this data was structured and stored in a MySQL database on the same server. The package included a "wizard" style installer typical of Windows applications, to install and configure the database, the graphical interface and the administrator user in a simple and intuitive way.

The fall of PDAs and the disappearance of Windows Mobile

The system has been working perfectly for years, but the appearance of the Smartphones that replaced the PDAs, and the new versions of Windows that stopped supporting the now disappeared Windows Mobile, assumed that in 2018 they will commission me to develop a completely new version and updated AsistVent for Android devices, which will use an online server with a web interface instead of a local server.