Using Visual Studio 2017, we will create a simple Windows Forms App template project. You can call the application anything you like, but I called mineeBookManager:

The project will be created and will look as follows:

OurSolutionneeds a Class Libraryproject to contain the classes that drive theeBookManagerapplication. Add a new Class Library project to your Solution and call iteBookManager.Engine:

A Class Libraryproject is added to the Solution with the default class name. Change this class toDocument:

TheDocumentclass will represent a single eBook. Thinking of a book, we can have multiple properties that would represent a single book, but be representative of all books. An example of this would be the author. All books must have an author, otherwise it would not exist.

The properties I have added to the class are merely my interpretation of what might represent a book. Feel free to add additional code to make this your own.

Open the Document.cs file and add the following code to the class:

namespace eBookManager.Engine 
{ 
    public class Document 
    { 
        public string Title { get; set; } 
        public string FileName { get; set; } 
        public string Extension { get; set; } 
        public DateTime LastAccessed { get; set; } 
        public DateTime Created { get; set; } 
        public string FilePath { get; set; } 
        public string FileSize { get; set; } 
        public string ISBN { get; set; } 
        public string Price { get; set; } 
        public string Publisher { get; set; } 
        public string Author { get; set; } 
        public DateTime PublishDate { get; set; } 
        public DeweyDecimal Classification { get; set; } 
        public string Category { get; set; } 
    } 
} 

You will notice that I have included a property calledClassification of type DeweyDecimal. We have not added this class yet, and will do so next.

To the eBookManager.Engine project, add a class called DeweyDecimal. If you don't want to go to this level of classification for your eBooks, you can leave this class out. I have included it for the sake of completeness:

Your DeweyDecimal class must be in the same project as the Document class added earlier:

The DeweyDecimal system is quite big. For this reason, I have not catered for every book classification available. I have also only assumed that you would want to be working with programming eBooks. In reality, however, you may want to add in other classifications, such as literature, the sciences, the arts, and so on. It is up to you. So let's create a class to represent the Dewey Decimal system::

namespace eBookManager.Engine 
{ 
    public class DeweyDecimal 
    { 
        public string ComputerScience { get; set; } = "000"; 
        public string DataProcessing { get; set; } = "004"; 
        public string ComputerProgramming { get; set; } = "005"; 
    } 
}

Word nerds may disagree with me here, but I would like to remind them that I'm a code nerd. The classifications represented here are just so that I can catalog programming and computer science-related eBooks. As mentioned earlier, you can change this to suit your needs.

YoureBookManager.Engine Solution will now contain the following classes:

The eBookManager.Engine project will be available under the Projects section in the Reference Manager screen:

The icons can be found in the img folder in the source code downloadable from GitHub at the following URL—https://github.com/PacktPublishing/CSharp7-and-.NET-Core-2.0-Blueprints.

The icons here are catering for PDF, MS Word, and ePub file types. It also contains folder images:

I love making use of extension methods in my projects. I usually add a separate project and/or class for this purpose. In this application, I added an eBookManager.Helper class library project:

Lastly, I will be using JSON as a simple file store for my eBook catalogue. JSON is really flexible and can be consumed by various programming languages. What makes JSON so nice is the fact that it is relatively light weight and the output it generates is human-readable:

You have now set up the basics needed for your eBookManager application. Next, we will venture further into the guts of the application by writing some code.