Point of Sale Application Architecture

Question

Hi Guys, I have been asked to build a POS Application for a Restaurant. I have experience creating POS application in VB6.0 and have always wanted to create one with UX. I am looking to create one with WPF as front end. I pretty much have the process picture in mind and also screens.

Said so much, I am not sure how to Architecture one.

Few Major questions that come to my mind are :

Should I use Composite Application Guidance for WPF - Prism. If the answer is yes will performance reduce as in POS Application, time can be critical, customers want prompt service.

I am thinking Dependency Injection should be used for better maintenance.

using ADO.NET Entity Framework- LinQ to SQL

I want to grow this application later to include Inventory Management and Data Mining, Management reports.

will use POS for .NET

Hope I will be able to get this all cleared up this weekend.

Please Advise.

Thank you,

Mar

Edit: I am still leaving it open will like to get more views/ advises.

Answer 1

Lots of general questions there, I'll try to touch a little on everything.

In general you should check out the Application Architecture Guide. It's a very good, general primer on architecting all sorts of .NET applications.

I don't think you are going to have any problem with Prisim. Take specific note of the MVVM Pattern. On the "performance" issue, I think what you are really talking about is "responsiveness". So a POS allplication needs to be very responsive to the user. Using WVVM, you can get very good responsiveness in your application.

Personally, I would stay away from this version of Entity Framework (although next version is looking good). I think LinqToSQL is fine (afterall, SO uses it :) Look at NHibernate for .NET if you want ORM.

Good luck.