The Roadmap
I believe I am the only person who uses Cash Tracker on a consistent basis, but I’ve found the application so useful that I’m going to plow ahead until I’m satisfied. So, for the Cash Tracker 1.0 release I plan to unveil some big new features. Plus, I’ve determined to create an online version of the tool. Here are the steps needed to proceed to that point:

1. Add most or all of the features on the upcoming features list
2. Acquire a catchy web domain name and SSL certificate
3. Possibly re-brand Cash Tracker under a different name for the web (i.e. whatever catchy domain name I find)
4. Port the Windows project to a data-driven website project using ASP.NET and SQL Server technologies

Contributions
If you’d like to contribute to the project, just drop me an email; I’ll be happy to set up a source control server. The project doesn’t really need funding beyond a web domain and SSL certificate purchase, but an extra pair of coding hands would definitely accelerate the release timeline.

So what goodies do you have for us?
The tool I will post (most likely tonight or tomorrow, under the name Screen Tracker) will do the following:

1. Record frames from the screen or a portion of the screen to a working directory.
2. Compile the frames into an AVI formatted video file.

And my upcoming feature wish-list:

1. Audio recording (either through the computer itself or via a microphone, maybe both)
2. The ability to add an .mp3 or .wav audio track

Audio/video is not a world I am well-versed in, so don’t hold your breath on the wish-list Just hope my great idea motivates me to make useful tools for you.

Cash Tracker going Beta
I’ve been using my latest version of Cash Tracker for a while, now, and it’s been working beautifully for me. I will probably post the most recent code and installer tonight or tomorrow as well. It’s ready for beta status, so I’ll update that designation as well (and maybe someone else will actually start using it!).

With .Net 3.5, Microsoft released the DataContractSerializer. It has a variety of uses, but at the very least it’s an improvement over the XmlSerializer. In Cash Tracker we started out by using the XmlSerializer to save files, but quickly found it inadequate, the reason being XmlSerializer does not play well with mixed access properties.

For an example, let’s look again at our Person class:

public class Person {
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public string Initials { get; private set; }

    private Person() {
    }
    public Person(string first, string last) {
        this.FirstName = first;
        this.LastName = last;

        this.Initials = String.Format("{0}.{1}.", FirstName[0], LastName[0]);
    }
}

Notice I’ve added a new property with a private mutator. Also, I added a constructor to take advantage of the new property and made my default constructor private. Now when we try to serialize using the XmlSerializer we get an error:

Unable to generate a temporary class (result=1).

error CS0200: Property or indexer ‘Person.Initials’ cannot be assigned to — it is read only

What to do?

In .Net 3.5, to get around this problem, Microsoft suggests using the DataContractSerializer, so we will investigate switching to the new technology here. First, we need a reference to System.Runtime.Serialization:

Once that’s done it’s actually pretty simply converting our old code. The new code looks like this:

static void XmlSerializePerson(Person myPerson, string fileName) {
    DataContractSerializer xs = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Person));

    using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write)) {
        xs.WriteObject(fs, myPerson);
    }
}

static Person XmlDeserializePerson(string fileName) {
    DataContractSerializer xs = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Person));

    using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read)) {
        return (Person)xs.ReadObject(fs);
    }
}

Notice we simply re-used the old methods, changing the object and methods used to serialize our Person. Our code will now execute as expected:

Download the Solution

You can download a zip file of the solution by clicking the link below.

DataContractSerializerDemo.zip

It’s really rough; I’m giving it a version of 0.7. I don’t have any error handling in place, so if you put the wrong values into the tracker it will probably scream at you and then die. If you’re not a geek you probably want to wait at least until version 0.9 gets released. Until then, I’m probably not going to settle on a reliable file type, so .tfx files saved before 0.9 probably won’t be compatible with later versions.

For a current list of features, check the Cash Tracker’s main page.

The idea for Cash Tracker came to me when I was trying to find an easy way track my own finances. I wanted something I could put my income and bills into and get a simple projection of my account balance throughout the year. Then, if I didn’t mind making adjustments later to reconcile (thus improving the projections as time goes by), I wanted to be able to enter a manual transaction here and there, too. But my main focus was keeping it simple. So, I wrote a very simple program that reads in a set of recurrences (bills, income) and transactions (non-recurring expenses or adjustments to bills/income). Then, it displays a set of numbers that are designed to help give me peace of mind about the future, like my project low and high balances for the year. To help me reconcile with my balance at the bank as the year goes on, I had the program output a running total I could open in Excel and compare with the bank.

Right now, that’s pretty much all the Cash Tracker does. It’s ugly, but it works as well as I need it to and keeps me from worrying about my finances. The project I’m undertaking is to bring Cash Tracker from “personal helper” to “helper to a lot of people” by making it easier for people to use who can’t write code or format a flat file correctly; people who don’t know what a CSV file is or what XML looks like. And, of course, I want to bring the Cash Tracker to other people like me who just don’t want to waste time on a “big” personal finance application, but still want to feel secure financially and have some numbers to support themselves with. I’m doing this solely because my Cash Tracker has helped me organize my own finances so much over the past 3 months.

I think Cash Tracker will appeal to many people because it makes maintaining finances so painless. Now that I have all my income and expenses into the program, it takes me just a few minutes every week or two to make the current projected balance line up with my actual balance. That includes the time I spend editing ugly, tab-delimited files. I am sure I can speed up the process even more.

So, the goal right now is to get the Cash Tracker into a form that other people can actually use. Eventually, I’d like to get it to “auto-magical” status, which would look something like this:

1. Select your financial institution
2. Enter your login credentials
3. Hit “Track It!”
4. <magic>
5. View a list of your regular expenses and income, your projected high and low balances this year, your projected balance for any date in the future, etc.

We’re talking zero maintenance. I believe we can get there, but we’re going to take baby steps.