New to writing code...brain is melting......
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
I'm not a very experienced developer and I didn't learn how to develop software at school either. So my advice may not be too accurate, but then again... I know how you're feeling since I was feeling like that too exactly one year ago. This was for me the epiphany that helped me tremendously: Try to think about a software project in layers. I don't know anything about the project you're attempting to make, so the following is just an example of a common structure: Database, Handler, Controller, Application layer. Think of the Database as the bottom layer and the application layer as the top. For each feature you create, start to work at the bottom and then work your way up. You'll find it'll be a lot easier to figure out what to do next if you try to work in that order, especially at first. If you have to work on existing project, try to see if a similar structure is there (if not, then you're basically screwed). Always respect the flow of data in your project, the role of your namespaces/classes; never make any exceptions to your own rules, unless the rules were wrong. In this case: the Database stores and provides information, the handler controls database and puts data into objects to pass on to the controller, the controller handles all the logic and the application layer talks with the controller and only deals with how the interface looks like. For the rest, you shouldn't worry too much about writing bad code when you're coding. You should worry a lot about it when you're not coding, but when you're coding you should make stuff happen and don't get paralysed. Avoid copy pasting code and try to re-factor/reuse code instead. Finally, focus on the basic functionality first and worry about the details later. Oh, and don't re-invent the wheel. Most of the stuff, if not all, you're trying to do has been done before and you have the Google machine at your disposal.
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
Just go for it. In the “old days”, we started as “programmer trainees” and were expected to be “on-call” within 2 weeks; you had to go in for at least an hour when there was a problem and attempt to fix it before calling someone else for help. (And these were mission-critical systems). You first did “maintenance” before being given development. Ask a supervisor or co-worker for a small, non-critical, outstanding work request on an existing application and dive in (in your spare time, if necessary). You’ll be a lot more motivated than if you were writing trivial sample apps you have no real interest in. (At this stage, you will need to present any changes you propose before implementing them and also submit to a code review later).
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
Keeping VB aside for a moment, you can take the free online 7-week long introductory Computer Science Course from Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101[^]) to get your basic computer science concepts understood. This course is in Python language, though. Back to VB, you can port snippets from that Python code to VB, and make them work. This way, you'll gradually become familiar with both programming concepts and their implementation.
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you can't. it's a personality thing. either your personality maps to the job description or it doesn't. quit while you are ahead, as my father would say, think that refers to gambling, but i am sure it pertains to your situation :suss:
David
I've known quality developers with all manner of personalities.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
I started my way to develop applications by taking an existing application and trying to rebuild it from scratch. Don't try to recreate an application which is pure magic for you. Keep it simple and extend it with your own ideas (even if they don't have anything to do with the original application anymore) - Take the basic functionality of the application and rebuild it by writing the code yourself. - Add additional functionality - Come up with ideas for ... - ... writing/reading something to a file - ... writing/reading something from database - ... making your application configurable (file and/or database) in my case it was the windows calculator :-D - I implemented the basic functionality like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. - Added errorhandling via message boxes - Added logging to file - added a value store (calculator memory function) which saves values in a db This helped my to getting a basic knowledge of the language and framework i was using. For solving problems codeproject.com and stackoverflow.com are very nice sites to find explanations and solutions for specific problems. most of the time you can expect that the problme you've got already someone else has asked it and someone else has provided a solution for it. It is important that you try to break your problem down from the whole code to an isolated reproducable problem. This helps yourself understanding what the problem really is and, if you can't come up with a solution yourself, others finding a solution for you (if your asking for help, of course) Later when you understand the basic, step it up a notch and try what you can accomplish using interfaces, derivation and so on. Greetings
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Just go for it. In the “old days”, we started as “programmer trainees” and were expected to be “on-call” within 2 weeks; you had to go in for at least an hour when there was a problem and attempt to fix it before calling someone else for help. (And these were mission-critical systems). You first did “maintenance” before being given development. Ask a supervisor or co-worker for a small, non-critical, outstanding work request on an existing application and dive in (in your spare time, if necessary). You’ll be a lot more motivated than if you were writing trivial sample apps you have no real interest in. (At this stage, you will need to present any changes you propose before implementing them and also submit to a code review later).
I would have to agree with this direction. While I have worked my way through the basics, at some point just creating example apps was extremely boring and not so fun. Getting your hands dirty in a big app with a small feature / fix required is a very good way to start figuring things out from within. (Analysis) The example way is good to do at the same time as a way to get more exp, think on different problems and starting on design thinking I suppose. (Synthesis)
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The IDE confuses the basic concepts of programming making it very difficult to understand why something is happening. Don't use the IDE until after you can get simple logic problems solved at the command line.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost "All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
Ennis, Are you seriously suggesting that this person who, evidently, has a stable long-term job in a company that uses VB.NET use a command-line, or ... what ? ... write console apps ? Unless you are being satirical, I find this hard to believe. yrs, Bill
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (Persian, Sufi, 804-872)
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http://www.codecademy.com/[^] http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/29/10-places-where-anyone-can-learn-to-code/[^] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/find-by-topic/[^], Engineering -> Computer Science MSDN has a lot of stuff, videos etc. Try YouTube? Chhose some thing that interests you to practice with, someone suggested one above, or how about a Mandelbrot drawing desktop app (something of a rite of passage) or make a basic calculator.
+5 At last: a helpful, on-topic, response, with links to appropriate resources. thanks, Bill
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (Persian, Sufi, 804-872)
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If you are good with one assembly language, you will not have much trouble with another. Group all kinds of programing languages by their closeness to the hardware and their generations (also roughly equivalent to the prevailing programing model) and you get an accurate impression of how small or big the step from one to another may be. And in the end they all produce just a lot of bytes that the processor will try to execute as instructions.
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Start with developing smaller apps. An Address management app for example... Edit: Address for Adress. Thanks OG.
+5 At last a relevant suggestion meant to be helpful ! thanks, Bill
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (Persian, Sufi, 804-872)
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you can't. it's a personality thing. either your personality maps to the job description or it doesn't. quit while you are ahead, as my father would say, think that refers to gambling, but i am sure it pertains to your situation :suss:
David
etkins wrote:
you can't.
it's a personality thing.
either your personality maps to the job description or it doesn't.Utter nonsense ! yrs, Bill
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (Persian, Sufi, 804-872)
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I started my way to develop applications by taking an existing application and trying to rebuild it from scratch. Don't try to recreate an application which is pure magic for you. Keep it simple and extend it with your own ideas (even if they don't have anything to do with the original application anymore) - Take the basic functionality of the application and rebuild it by writing the code yourself. - Add additional functionality - Come up with ideas for ... - ... writing/reading something to a file - ... writing/reading something from database - ... making your application configurable (file and/or database) in my case it was the windows calculator :-D - I implemented the basic functionality like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. - Added errorhandling via message boxes - Added logging to file - added a value store (calculator memory function) which saves values in a db This helped my to getting a basic knowledge of the language and framework i was using. For solving problems codeproject.com and stackoverflow.com are very nice sites to find explanations and solutions for specific problems. most of the time you can expect that the problme you've got already someone else has asked it and someone else has provided a solution for it. It is important that you try to break your problem down from the whole code to an isolated reproducable problem. This helps yourself understanding what the problem really is and, if you can't come up with a solution yourself, others finding a solution for you (if your asking for help, of course) Later when you understand the basic, step it up a notch and try what you can accomplish using interfaces, derivation and so on. Greetings
+5 A very well thought-out response. thanks, Bill
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (Persian, Sufi, 804-872)
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
Hi, ITWino, In my opinion, if you "have been been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...)," then you are already a programmer on many levels. The skills of logical analysis, framing the problem to be solved, planning a solution in stages, step-by-step iteration and testing, and problem-solving, etc., you know in hardware will, I believe, transpose into programming. While I think it is unfortunate that you are going to focus on VB.NET to learn programming, if that's the "currency" of the work environment you are in for the future, well, so be it. I say this not because I have any prejudice against VB.NET, but, because I think Microsoft truly created a mutant monster when they adapted VB6 to VB.NET, and the awkward and obscure syntax, and constructs, they added to the language to force it to fit into an object-oriented programming universe, is a spaghetti-verse of syntax that makes learning/using it much more difficult than, for example, C#. For learning basic programming concepts, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using an IDE like Visual Studio ! Programming these days is about objects, and events, about classes, and sub-classes, about graphic user-interfaces, and database access. Programming, now, is about user-interfaces in which asynchronous events occur (the does user does anything at any time, depending on mode/context). If you have a set of good introductory books, go through them step-by-step. Pose yourself small challenges, and implement them. You like math problems: how about Project Euler as a source of a vast series of problems to solve (from simple to very complex) [^]. And, you have had other good resources recommended to you, here, by several people, like the course at MIT. Consider asking the experts in your own company for their advice/thoughts on small projects to create on your own: if your goal is to become productive writing code in your company. yrs, Bill
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (Persian, Sufi, 804-872)
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Learning Visual Basic will tar you as a n00b forever, and firmly establish a reputation that will be very difficult to get out of. If you are going to learn a CLR language, C# might be a better choice. And if you want to expand your horizons beyond Microsoft, java might be the one.
-- Harvey
A large part of learning a .Net language is learning the framework, Visual Studio, OO concepts and design patterns eg MVC. Somebody who is a competant VB.Net developer won't have much trouble picking up C# - same framework, same IDE, same OO concepts baked in. The difference is mainly down to syntax. Hence why there are websites offering VB.Net to C# converters and visa-versa!
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Hi, ITWino, In my opinion, if you "have been been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...)," then you are already a programmer on many levels. The skills of logical analysis, framing the problem to be solved, planning a solution in stages, step-by-step iteration and testing, and problem-solving, etc., you know in hardware will, I believe, transpose into programming. While I think it is unfortunate that you are going to focus on VB.NET to learn programming, if that's the "currency" of the work environment you are in for the future, well, so be it. I say this not because I have any prejudice against VB.NET, but, because I think Microsoft truly created a mutant monster when they adapted VB6 to VB.NET, and the awkward and obscure syntax, and constructs, they added to the language to force it to fit into an object-oriented programming universe, is a spaghetti-verse of syntax that makes learning/using it much more difficult than, for example, C#. For learning basic programming concepts, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using an IDE like Visual Studio ! Programming these days is about objects, and events, about classes, and sub-classes, about graphic user-interfaces, and database access. Programming, now, is about user-interfaces in which asynchronous events occur (the does user does anything at any time, depending on mode/context). If you have a set of good introductory books, go through them step-by-step. Pose yourself small challenges, and implement them. You like math problems: how about Project Euler as a source of a vast series of problems to solve (from simple to very complex) [^]. And, you have had other good resources recommended to you, here, by several people, like the course at MIT. Consider asking the experts in your own company for their advice/thoughts on small projects to create on your own: if your goal is to become productive writing code in your company. yrs, Bill
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it. Abu Yazid Al-Bistami (Persian, Sufi, 804-872)
"I say this not because I have any prejudice against VB.NET, but, because I think Microsoft truly created a mutant monster when they adapted VB6 to VB.NET, and the awkward and obscure syntax, and constructs, they added to the language to force it to fit into an object-oriented programming universe, is a spaghetti-verse of syntax that makes learning/using it much more difficult than, for example, C#." You are so far off the mark there your comment is laughable. VB.Net is a completely different beast to VB6 or VBA. Geez, its been ten years since VB.Net was released, when will people forget VB6 and move on from their noob like prejudices! VB.Net is OO from the ground up. It has more in common with C# than VB6!
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.
I am a self taught VB developer. I learned basic programming concepts in high school in the 70's and learned Fortran in college in the early 80's. I recommend this series of video tutorials if you are interested: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Basic-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners[^] Very easy to follow and they are geared toward VB express so you can get the IDE at home. Hope this helps!
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Hello all.... Great web site. Love the info and suggestions I can get here. So, I have been doing IT work for over 25 years (servers, networks, hardware, etc...) and never delved into the development field. I now have the opportunity to learn writing and modifying code, but I am having a hard time making this logic click. I have several beginner books on Visual Studio (2005,2010,2012)and have done the training classes offered by a local business. I am focusing on Visual Basic as my language of choice because the company I work for uses this only. Any suggestions on how I can make all this info click? I understand the concepts, but just could not write the code behind a app i lay out in VS Designer to save my life. EDIT: Thanks all for the great advice. I sort of suspected I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. Going to go back simple and work my way up.