C#
I’ve decided to make C# the next language I learn. On Sloat’s suggestion, I download the free Express Edition, and have been playing around with it a little the past few days. I have a few ideas running through my head on apps I want to make, but before I jump into anything I’m going to try and get a decent background (via online tutorials – right now I’m using what comes up on Google, if anyone has any suggestions for some good resources, let me know).
Later on I may take a look at VB 2007, but since there currently doesn’t seem to be any advantages to using it (at least from what I can tell), I’ll probably delay learning it.
Scrolling Text Time Waster
While looking around on some old CDs I found this, a fun little scrolling text time waster. It’s a PHP version of one of my old Javascript apps. The PHP version was originally located at my UMBC personal page, though at some point I took it down. After looking over the script, I touched it up a bit and figured it was amusing enough, so I decided to post it up.
As a side note, my decision to post it up was partly because of these people. I had honestly never received any feed back on my old Javascript app and had actually wondered if it ever got used at all (or if people thought I was childish for posting it). It’s neat to see how stuff can find its way around the net. As a side note to this side note, I sometimes wonder if my googling skills come off as creepy. My old suite mate Mike (who I talked about in the last post) helped me refine them a little bit when I lived with him. He was actually kind of legendary for his googling skills. I have some funny stories about Mike and googling, but I’m sure he’d kill me if I posted them here.
More AOL Macro Fonts
The number of AOL fonts has doubled in the TAAG app. You can view them by selecting “AOL Macro Fonts” from the Font Type combo box and then running the Test All feature. In addition to these new fonts, the “TRaC” and “Cheese” AOL fonts were fixed (woo!).
This deludge of new fonts comes from various old apps I obtained through lenshellarchive.com. It’s a pretty neat place, it aims at having the largest archive of old progs. What one can do with progs written for software that isn’t used anymore is anyone’s guess, but it’s cool to see they’ve been saved somewhere. However, even though it says everything has been run through a virus checker, I’d be cautious before downloading anything. Some of that stuff is kind of shady.
Interestingly enough, the site actually hosts my old fader program, giving it the low rating of 5/10, which I thought was kind of amusing. It honestly wasn’t that good of an app, though it was the first program I released on this website (when I was at geocities), and it actually generated a lot of positive feed back, so it encouraged me to keep going. How it ended up at lenshellarchive is anyone’s guess. I had no idea anyone else hosted it (btw, I encourage outside hosting of any of my downloadable apps), but according to a txt included in the zip I downloaded:
You Should Have Downloaded This From
Kamz Domain [ http://www.kamzdomain.com ]
If You Did Not Please Email Me At
Kam@kamzdomain.com
and Let me Know Where You Got It So
I can End This Link Stealing Bullshit|¯|’/¯/ /¯/\ |¯|\/|¯|
|÷|/_/ ‘ /÷/\¯\ ‘ |÷|\/|÷|
|÷|\¯\ ”/÷/ ¯\÷\ |÷| |÷|
|_|’\_\ |_| \_| |_| |_|
According to archive.org, kamzdomain.com existed for a brief period of time in 1999. It’s neat to find stuff like this, I feel like an internet archaeologist. I wonder if the app made any more stops before ending up at lenshellarchive.
It’s crazy that there were actually THAT many progs. I really don’t remember it being that prevalent.
Was it something that happened after AOL 4.0?
AOL 4.0 was the last version I used, I still remember a ton of progs from that time period though. My neighbor was actually really into them at the time and he’d send me the latest ones when he got them. I can even think of progs that that site is missing – Mad Cow and MIB.
When that friendship dissolved I basically stopped following them (this would be in mid or late 1998). I can only imagine that even more were made after that since the code to create everything was readily available on the net.
C# is a decent language to learn. It’s java with about 10% differences. The things I like most about it are #region tags and object properties. C++ had me constantly writing code that should have been generated for me (getters, setters). The tools for developing with it are Microsoft specific. Visual Studios has limits and doesn’t integrate well with Subversion source control. The build tools that are associated with it aren’t as simple as make or ANT though I am trying to find time to play with Nunit, and Nant. Also it needs a ‘Hibernate’/’Toplink’ like library for easy Data Access Layers.
make files and ant files can get kind of complicated. I’ve worked on projects where I almost went nuts trying to figure out how the ant file was doing something (this was a situation where the file included files that included other files and so on). Though something like that might not be unavoidable in large projects.
Right now I’m thinking I’ll only use C# for Windows GUI apps, though that may change later down the line.
As a side note, header files annoy me. I’m glad to see that C# doesn’t have them.