I should start this by admitting that the whole of any formal training I’ve ever had in computer programming is from two semesters of “intro” computer courses my freshman year at Rutgers, when I had delusions of being a Computer Science major. Since then, it’s been all coding without a clue. I bring this up, because right now, I am trying to code something very, very simple, and it’s kicking my unholy ass.At my job, we use remote access tools to go into user’s machines and fix their issues. In order to do this, we need to know their IP addresses. It can be troublesome to walk someone through the whole process of getting to ipconfig, so I am writing a tool that puts an icon in the system tray and when you hover over it, a balloon pops up and shows you your IP address. Well, I got the basic stuff figured out. I have a lil window, I have the icon, I found some code to return the IP address, but now I can’t figure out how to do some basic things, like show the main window when you double click the system tray icon, etc. I’m coding in C#, because it’s the most like Java, and that’s what I had my “formal” training in. I like it, and it’s mostly easy to figure out, but I can’t figure out how to do some of this basic stuff. I know that in VB, you can do things like Form.Show and Form.Hide and it’s easy. I don’t know how to do some of that in C#. Even with a couple of well written books about C#, I’m having a hard time (I do reccomend Programming C# by Jesse Liberty. It’s well written and fairly easy to follow). It just feels like some of this stuff should be really easy to follow and stuff, but I’m utterly lost. You have to picture me sitting at my desk trying to read thru the help files and online help for this and being bug-eyed. It’s quite an eye-opening experience, in some fun ways.
The more I work, the better I’m sure I will get, but let me tell you, it’s quite an experience to code without a clue.
