This weekend gave me an opportunity to have my first look at Visual Studio Express C#. After an excellent night out with friends and a trip to the local rock nightclub (Corporation), Saturday was always going to be a chill out day.
I have previously took a look at VB.Net which looks far better than the VB6 that I use in my day job. C# looks even better. I’m not sure if the IDE are different but there seems to be lots of great stuff in the C# IDE with the code snippets library, the plug in managers and some of the common controls that just save so much time.
In VB6 I do make a lot of use with control arrays. This is where it’s going to be interesting to see how I do things without the control arrays. The main reason for using them was to be able to attribute common code to then events and to be able to create new controls on a form on the fly. I have seen the nice way that you can assign code to events on multiple controls and that looks really neat as you can use the same code for different object types. I haven’t yet seen how to create the controls on the fly and assign the common code to them. If you have thoughts on this, please do post for me.
I used a few tutorials from the Microsoft website to take me through the IDE and these were really useful,easy to follow and intuitive. What I need now is information on how to code in C#, it’s a bit different in syntax to VB6 and to play more with classes and to find the best way to code OO.
One of the things that I need to catch up with is variable naming conventions. It appears, having spoken with others, that the naming conventions that I use from VB6 are no longer used in todays languages. The other thing is to write more OO code and to use classes rather than subroutines and functions. Another thing to do is to see how to write the unit tests for the classes to test the code automatically. Time to start doing some more reading. The Internet is great for finding out information but I have to admit that I do still prefer to read a good physical book rather than a web page.
After playing around for about 5 or 6 hours I came to the conclusion that I think I prefer C# to VB.Net.
If you have any good links to sites for C# please do post some links for me. I am very keen to take it further with this language.
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Hey, So tickets for Barcamp Blackpool have been released. This is being held on the 3rd July and I can’t wait. Looking on the Google Groups ofor the event shows some exciting presentations that I am looking forward to going to. One of the talks is on how rubbish coding can cost time and money and ways to prevent it.
I have just completed reading Practices of an Agile Developer and found this, along with The Pragmatic Programmer, really useful. It does go over a lot of things which shouldjust be natural to any programmer but reinforces the practices. I am now actively try, as we all should, to make my coding and working practices much better.
Easter Monday we took the kids and some friends to Beltchley Park. The kids had a great time doing the easter egg hunt and making easter baskets. It’s amazing that every time we go to Bletchley that you learn a little more of what went on there and things that went on during the war.
The National Museum of Computing which is based at Bletchley is also a great place to visit and is always expanding. It always takes me back to when I first started working back in the late 80’s, especially on this visit when I saw an old IBM mini which we used to run PICK Blue on. PICK Blue was the IBM implementation of PICK.
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Hi All,
I thought with this being the start of the year an all that I would make some New Years resolutions. I don’t normally do this as I’m terrible at keeping to them. I thought though that Ishould try this year and at least make them achievable (Winning the lottery never seems to happen).
- Stop smoking.
I’ve been trying to stop smoking for years and actually managed it a few years ago for about 6 months. This time it will happen though. I’m currently on my 5th day. I see can a treat of a curry for getting through the 1st week.
- Eat more healthily and do some exercise.
Not as many kebabs and Indian takeaways this year. I’ll also try and cut down on the drinking as well. I’m sure a few of you will miss the “rixhamisation” when we go out (you know who you are 
) but I think it has to be limited this year.
- Read up more on the technical stuff and actually come up with an app that may be of some use.
What I really want to do is get more in to OO programming and learn someVB.Net and some Ruby. This is already in hand and I hope to start looking more at a Ruby app in the next week or so with @marcjohnson and @ashleymoran.
- Make some positive changes to work practices and become more efficient in projects and management.
Think I need to do some more reading on Agile management process, OO programming and some more Project Management.
I think that these resolutions are achievable during this year. Most of these have already been started on already.
So what are your resolutions for this year? Maybe we can help each other out?
A hope every one has a great 2010.
Cheers,
Richard
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