HELP Chinese Takeaway orders

:confused: Hello! well its been roughly 10 years since i porgrammed games in BASIC for the Amiga and now im here, needing to program again...

Question: I have been asked to buy/create a pargram for a chinese takeaway that the staff can input orders when they recieve them, this data then gets passed to the kitchens computer where the cooks can see the order and a reciept is printed.


I would really appreciate basic starting points and tips to start me off. I know VBasic should be more than capable of the job. Im sorry this is a bit sketchy, i have just been told about it myself last nite. Im at the initial stage of working out weather a professional program already existing should be used or weather i should be looking at creating a simple programme myself

Oh, additional, ill have to at some point change the text to chinese :oS but that can wait (i was thinking about making all Menus and field text editable so they can do that themselves after the English version is up and running)

should be a fairly simple program to create..

if this is a 2 computer thing (one out front, one in the kitchen) I'd say maybe make a simple server/client application

for the server application (the one out where they order) a form with the possible menu items, as you press them it creates an order (basically you could save this in an array or in a listbox or something) once the order is complete the user clicks the big ORDER NOW button, which sends some data via tcp/ip or similar to the client application (in the kitchen) which will be listening for inforamation from the server.. once it does, display the order on screen and print it out.. you could even go as far as giving them the ability to press a button to say the order is ready and have it display out front so they know its ready..

like I say.. should be pretty straightforward.. of course, there's probably already something similar out there.. but as a project, it could be a nice gentle learning curve into .NET

Excellent mate :o) exactly the type of info i was looking for. It look slike a heavy week for me learning VBasic! Regarding your comment about there being possible other programs out there, ill also be looking into that due to me having at least 8 graphics projects on the go. .. But it does look like im back on the programing scene again. God i miss it :D

Thanks again, i owe you a pint if your ever in the area lol

Everyone else please keep on posting :)

no problem fella.. you're safe on that pint though.. dont live in the uk anymore.. :P

if you have any specific questions on the project im sure you'll get plenty of help on here

If you haven't coded in a while I would recommend downloading VStudio 2005 Express Edition or VStudio Orca (2008) beta. I downloaded an installed it the other day looks identical to 2005 but with some new feature.

And requires .NET framework 3.5?

That's why I ditched it. back to 2005.

Anyways whats new in ORCA?

I would make the kitchen pc the server, in case you have more computers in the front taking orders in the future.

Since menus don't change (often), you should probably store the menu in a database, so that way all you transfer between clients and the server is a lookup number to show what was ordered and the quantity (this way, you can also do statistical analysis on frequency of orders, ingredient usage, etc.), rather than the entire order and recipes.