C#

I have a degree in Computer Science. I am a programmer. When some one can't figure out how our application works I look directly at the code and tell them step by step what it does. I also have some nice tools that allow me to track data values as they are being operated on so that when a value is entered into the system and comes out as something unexpected or possibly even incorrect, I can track through and see where the fruitiness happens.

My beautiful wife is a Software Engineer. A really good one. If we worked in the same company she would be the one actually writing the application that my group uses. She'd be the brains behind it all.

When I was at Middlesex Community College my classes primarily used the programming language called C. I also spent one semester touching on C++ and another touching on Java. At UMass Lowell again most of the programming courses used C. One semester used C++. My senior project courses, 2 semesters, used a number of different things here and there including HTML, javascript, and Java Swing. There was also a little bit of lex and yak in a database class along with a little SQL, and one horrible semester's worth of Scheme. (a shudder of horror just went down my spine)

When I started my job all of that went out the window. The company I work for uses it's own language, it's own database, it's own operating system (in one of the platforms I work on), it's own email client, it's own word processor, it's own calendar/schedule program, it's own everything.

After a few years all of the language syntaxes and conventions and structures along with a lot of the design techniques I'd worked on in school were pretty much gone.

Then I met my wife. (Hi Jen!)

A lot of what I had done in school was already becoming obsolete when I graduated and Jen had already moved beyond it into new and better things. We had talked a lot about maybe trying to figure out a project that we could work on for fun that would have the side effect of keeping her skills sharp away from the office, and letting me see some of the cool stuff that has come along since I left school. Win/Win as far as I can see. Add to that the fact that we are very much two computer nerds who are inseparable and would enjoy nothing more than to sit side by side with a couple of computers hammering out geekiness for other people's online consumption. Wouldn't every married couple see that as a honkin' good time? If they don't then they should get the sticks out of their asses and do it.

Last night we finally got around to it. We have a couple of vague ideas for the overall project we want to work on. Maybe something social for families, or maybe something to catalog your DVD/CD collection. Maybe even simple things like a website for my father's tax business. Who knows what we'll end up with.

The first step, however, is getting me back up to speed using current tools. We started with Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net. I had used Visual Studio 6.0, but the next version after that was the first version of .Net and it changed everything. I was very much lost poking around the development environment, but Jen cleared up what I need to get by for now.

We also played with a language that was totally new for me, C#. It is an object oriented programming language that I had never looked at before. C++ and Java are both object oriented too, so conceptually it wasn't new to me, but I still had to dig the correct terminology out of the deep recesses of my memory, and get back into the swing of writing source code in a language that allows white space again.

We didn't do anything terribly useful for anything other than a teaching tool. We defined a class that defines a person and then defined a second class that defines a student which inherits the properties of a person. Simple stuff, but I hadn't used that portion of my brain in something like seven years. It was nice to brush a little dust off, and it was fun playing techie with my sweetie.

She wants to get into ASP .Net tonight. Server side programming. That's a new one for me. I've done some web stuff using HTML and javascript and even a tiny bit of XML but it was all client side. I'm looking forward to the next lesson. Believe it or not, dorky stuff like this is fun.