2 replies to this topic

[Zer033]

Hi everyone. I have been programming awhile and I'm recently getting back into it, but I have a shortage of ideas for actual practical programs. I write little console applications a lot to test various programming ideas, but I'm kind of stuck as to applying the knowledge to a practical program. I've been reading a book on Visual .NET languages, mainly Visual C++ and I want to use that to make some kind of practical windows program.

So my questions are: 1) How is Visual C++ and the .NET framework for programming is it something I should keep at if I'm interested in developing windows programs. Is it widely used and can you give examples of how it is used most often. 2) Does anyone have any ideas on some practical programs that I can make. Maybe programs that are tiered in complexity, but that are actually useful for doing something other than testing programming ideas.

[artificial]

.NET seems to be the future of Windows programming. At least in Germany, it is useful to have some basic knowledge of it if you want to work in a software company. Personally, I don't like it for it is platform dependent, but maybe our aims are just different. :p

I don't know what you are interested in, so I just list some possible projects:

• a simple game (like Pong)
  
• some scientific application (for physics or the like)
  
• a graphical application (like Windows' Paint)
  
• an instant messenger

Greets,
artificial

[Zer033]

Thanks for the suggestions. I've made simple games plenty of times (my programming is primarily gaming based), but I'm trying to get into business software programming because my company has a programming department that I would like to get into. I've done physics applications before as well. I made a windows paint program, and never done an instant messenger so that might be interesting. I created a calculator in Visual C++ .NET yesterday just to get acquainted with .NET.

I'm kind of thinking of a program that loads files with a certain number of records in them, you set a priority for different IDs that are in each record, and then it merges the records and purges out duplicates sending the records to the highest priority ID.

The way I was thinking about it was the files to be loaded would be flat files where at some position on each line is an ID which means that the record belongs to that ID. There will also be a unique ID so that we would know if a record repeats. Through the program we can put a priority on the first non unique ID so that if any unique ID repeats for a non unique ID that record would belong to the highest priority unique ID. By the end we would know how many records belong to which ID. I want to add some other functionality as well, but this is the basis of the program I want to try to make.