I love C# and Visual Studio

As mentioned in my last post, I am learning C# and so far I am loving it!

I have a pretty cool ColdFusion based Live Support application written and started the Operators console in Visual Basic 6 but I decided there is no better way to learn a new language than having to learn it in a productive way. I decided to put the VB6 version on hold and redo it in C#.

And you know what? Its fun! It reminds me of why I love programming so much. The satisfaction of actually accomplishing what you set out to do is second to none.

For me to be completely comfortable with my choice of switching languages, I decided to take all the knowledge I have in Visual Basic and make itty bitty projects accomplishing a specific area. I was pretty hot on the WebBrowser control and could beat it into any shape I wanted so that was the first thing I wanted to do.

Tonight I developed a full tabbed browser in C# with the ability to:

• Add Tabs
• Delete Tabs
• Capture events from the DOM of the selected tab page
• Interface with my C# application from the JS in the webpage.

The reason I need this is because the ColdFusion Live Support Application takes chat requests from a queue and when accepted by the operator, a new tab is created to hold the chat.

This was a major effort in Visual Basic 6 but it has taken me just under 1 1/2 hours tonight. I even went a bit further and created the whole thing in a reusable class for other projects.

I am really getting to love Object Orientated Programming and hope to use what I learned tonight for my next ColdFusion and Javascript projects.