So much going on, so much to talk about and still I say nothing…

I’ve been working fairly hard lately, and have been working on my own projects at night even harder so my blog has suffered.

Enough excuses, enough whining, on to some real content…

For those of you who don’t know I work for a publicly traded company where I’m a VB.NET programmer (hold the jokes, hold the rotten tomatoes).  I work on anything from simple ASP.NET reports to a complex WinForms application for allowing our customers to run their entire businesses.

First my history with programming…

I started out in “programming” writing in ROM-BASIC for an Atari 800 that somehow my oldest brother convinced my parents to buy us.  Man we were cool, we’d spend an entire day typing in some program (usually a game) from the latest magazine, then we’d spend most of the night debugging it to find which line we’d mistyped and finally we were ready to play it for about 15 minutes when we’d shut the computer off causing us to lose our days work since we didn’t have anyway to store anything at the time. Ohhh those were the days.

The next time I got into “programming” was in the high-time of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).  I’m not sure how I got into this world of dialing into someone else’s computer system to leave messages to people I didn’t know, play games, and even download programs (my first experience with pornography as well J).  I quickly learned how to program batch files to make them do some amazing things for BBS’, which was quite the accomplishment at the time since I was about 15 and had 25 and 30 year olds who were asking me to help them get their BBS’ running properly.  Around this time I got a copy of Turbo Pascal 5.5 (not sure about the version number).  A friend of mine from the BBS’, Vaskin and I learned Pascal at the same time and started having fun writing “hello world” applications.  I eventually started writing “helper” applications for BBS’.  My first paying programming job was from a local BBS operator who wanted a program to calculate the average age of all his users.  I made $20!!!  My appetite was wetted at this point and there was no stopping this hobby of mine. 

At this point Vaskin had graduated high school and while going to college he got a job working for a local consulting company who was working on a microISV project internally to offer a LAN-based DOS Menu system.  It was being written in Clipper, a DBASE type programming language from Computer Associates.  After Vaskin had been working at this job for a few months the boss asked him if he knew anyone else who’d be interested in doing some after school programming for $6/hr. A week later I was working for the company and learning Clipper. Vastly different than Pascal, it still didn’t take me long to become acclimated to the new programming language. I worked there for almost a year and a half before they went out of business due to lack of funding (they had stopped all consulting work and focused solely on development of the menu system).

From here, I went back to programming as a hobby.  I bounced from various computer stores, to consulting companies and at some point I decided to take another look at the current iteration Turbo Pascal which was Turbo Pascal for Windows v1.0…I didn’t take to it very well, where was my old Turbo Pascal, what’s the deal with all this extra programming I have to do!  I passed on it at the time and just continued on with the consulting work I was doing.  A year or two later I finally decided to look at it again, because I had several ideas for programs bouncing around in my head and wanted to get back into it.  I revisited Turbo Pascal for Windows again, but it had been renamed to Delphi…There was more than just a new name with this programming language.  The IDE had been greatly improved, and everything just made more sense to me this time around.  At this point I was working for a consulting company that was in the niche market of Sales Force Automation, later known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  We were the only dealer in the area for a small package called Goldmine.  Goldmine at the time was running on a DBASE back-end, so coming from Clipper everything made sense to me when I started looking at the tables and trying to understand how the data was being stored.  This got me thinking…Well Delphi has some DBASE database controls built-in, I wonder what I could do with the data.  I was soon writing all sorts of useless one-off programs to manipulate various pieces of data in Goldmine that made my bosses happy, and our customers even happier.  I made a couple of attempts to create full fledged shrink-wrapped add-ons for Goldmine, but due to lack of time available for completing them they never got beyond beta-testing.

I was definitely hooked on programming again though; I didn’t want to be doing the network consulting, or Goldmine installations.  I wanted to be writing applications…

I soon found a job at a local dotcom who was building a Learning Management System with Delphi, by creating CGI apps that delivered the necessary web pages.  I spent almost two years at this company before they finally got sold to a company in Phoenix as a last ditch effort for the VCs to recoup some of their money.  As expected, before the ink was dry on the deal they were laying off people left and right.  I saw the writing on the wall so quickly looked for employment elsewhere. 

I ended up at a bank for almost a year doing report writing and DBA work, before I finally took my current job.

At the point that I took the job at my current employer it would take me about 15 seconds to tell you everything I knew about Visual Basic, let alone the .NET framework.  But I was confident in my abilities to learn from the other programmers at the company.  Unfortunately it didn’t take long for me to learn everything of use that the programmers knew about VB.NET.  We as a company weren’t doing anything complicated or fantastic with VB.NET.  Simple WinForms applications, simple ASP.NET reports…

So I began working at night and on the weekends to learn more. In the past two years I’ve easily written 200+ simple applications just to figure out how to accomplish some task or another with VB.NET…Reading/writing files, communicating with webservices, working with datasets, remoting, communicating with other applications, etc…I wrote some simple application for everything I could think of or heard about to make sure I understood how it worked.  But still I wasn’t learning anything all that fantastic about Visual Basic.  So I started looking for code samples on the internet.  I started looking at open source projects I could find and looking at their code to try and understand how “real” applications were built…

I’ve learned more in the last 6 months about the .NET framework and VB.NET than I’ve learned about any programming language in the last 15+ years…Do I know everything? Far from it…At this point I think with a little studying I could probably go pass several of the VB.NET MCSD tests.  So I’m confident in my abilities.  But still I want to learn more, so I’ve started looking for project work from companies in my area, to work on at night and on the weekends.  I’ve also joined an open source project that is developing plug-ins for Visual Studio.NET based on the DXCore framework from Developer's Express.  You can also find me on the Microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb newsgroup offering help where I can, but reading a lot more than I’m writing.

What does all this mean to you?  I’m going to test my knowledge by speaking of the things I know…I’m going to blog about things I’m doing, and have done.  One of two things will happen:

(1)   I’ll find out what an idiot I really am…

(2)   I’ll help a few people who are trying to figure out how to do some of the things I’m blogging about.

Either way, I’ll be a better person on the other end of this…

Stay tuned for programming related blogs!