Searching for expirience

Hello, I'm new to this forum and to visual basic .net, i have just finished the book, Sam's Visual Basic 2008 in 24 Hours. I am now beginning to read another book, Mastering Visual Basic 2008. I run visual basic .net 3.5 2008. I'm learning visual basic as a main hobby. I am 16 years old.

I'm searching to do a project on really anything (well, nothing that hard) to improve my experience in visual basic and my knowledge in the language. Unfortunately, i have no ideas on what application to make or attempt to make to do that.

I am also wondering if there is a place where people meet to work on projects together, i might want to work on a small open-source project with some other entry level programmer(s) for non-profit and just for experience and gratification.

If any of you experts can guide me in the direction i need to go from here to build experience and possibly a portfolio. Please comment!

Thank you,
-t0rk3y (C.Bale)

Welcome to the forums.

I wouldn't start out with collaboration so much as trying something on your own to begin with (partly that's because I wouldn't be too willing to show crappy code at the beginning of things). However, choosing a project to work on is not an easy task, as you have realized. Most books start off with something like the Hello World project, but that's awfully limitted. Many people suggest creating a calculator, but there's one build into Windows, so how satisfying would that be?

I'm currently working on a little project that I was thinking of posting on here in a few days so that people could play around with it. The code will be fairly small, but will cover all kinds of different aspects of a non-database program. However, the subject will be a bit out there, as it is a genetic algorithm intended to evolve optimal solutions to a common, but vexingly difficult problem. Is that introductory? Well, the code will be fairly simple and fairly small, as GAs tend to be, but the concept isn't simple.

When i started with VB, i started with VB5, and i would basically make the UI, then hand it over to my guardian, whom was a vb5 pro, and he would make it work. I liked that :)

Some projects i did on my own were a text editor, Coin Counter, Web browser, Media Player, and Point of Sale App.

:wave: Welcome to VBF

So, i should not start on a small project, but finish reading Mastering Visual Basic 2008 to improve my skills for a future project?

Then i could consider a collaborative?

I would spend some time thinking about what project I would like to work on. I suspect that you have done enough reading to begin on something. After all, eventually the new reading will just be overwriting what you had heard before, and it won't really sink in until you start using that knowledge. Choosing something to work on is the hard part, though.

Lately i'm working on a Purchase / Budget application to study a programming language.

I have a general idea of what it would look like and what it would do in the long term but i am working on making it work one step at a time. Like now I'm looking to provide an interface to save purchases onto the DB. next would be to provide a search of those purchases and lastly a statistics that shows purchase footprint to give a budget forecast.

I do this solely to study... hehe. There is another one, when i decided to study c# I had a problem of rewriting all mp3 id3 tags into the correct ones. since i have thousands of songs I had to automate it.

so basically, think of anything within your personal circumstance that you want to automate. There are a lot. You could start a game inventory if you have a lot of games, or music cd/dvd inventory etc etc.

If you look around you would be amazed at the simple projects you could do. One I did was to create a personalized picture viewer that we give to friends and relatives with pictures of our grandchildren. Try a small data base project like oceanebelle suggested for games or dvd's or cd's. Combine them all together and add different forms for each. Do a personalized address book.

One thing I tend to do is watch the forums and when someone asks how to do something that I find interesting, I say I think I can do that and then proceed to develop an application off of some body elses comments.

Thanks for all the comments guys, i think i have a solid place to start now, I'm going to try and work on a database program. Thanks!

database probably isnt the best place to start. You should get a feel of the controls that you have to work with first. Go with a simple web browser. You can utilize a lot of controls, while making a useful application.

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Originally Posted by dclamp

database probably isnt the best place to start. You should get a feel of the controls that you have to work with first. Go with a simple web browser. You can utilize a lot of controls, while making a useful application.

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whenever I start an application, the first thing I would do is sit down and make the database all its entities and relations and from there work the business logic slowly.

see I have trouble writing one piece of code for a data driven app when the data definitions are not in place yet.

See now we were taught that the right way was to define and classify your business logic first, and that would define your database and your table relationships. Different schools of thought :lol:

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Originally Posted by oceanebelle

whenever I start an application, the first thing I would do is sit down and make the database all its entities and relations and from there work the business logic slowly...

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But how in the world can you even start modeling your database if you know nothing (or very little) about the business that may ultimately run off of it?! :confused:

Until you get some understanding of the business how would you know what entities (tables), proprieties (fields) and relationships you would really need?

I would start off with a "simple" game (although whether or not you think it's "simple" depends on many things). And by "game", I am thinking along the lines of a word game or a card game, not a full-blown action game with animation and all that kind of stuff.

On the Tutorials section of my site, I have examples of Tic-Tac-Toe, Hangman, Cryptogram, and Concentration, as well as a children's game that matches words to pictures (to demonstrate drag-and-drop). I have these examples in both VB 2005 as well as classic VB6.

You may or may not want to look at those for ideas, and then come up with something on your own (like maybe a version of "Deal or No Deal" or a card game like Poker or Blackjack).

Thats not what i meant. I meant that he should not start his very first project ever as a program that deals with a database.

I agree with you that you should start with database structure. :)

How can you start with the structure when it is the business logic that determines the relationships in the structure?

Well when you start a project, you know the basic tables that your going to need, and you can start with those.

This is getting off topic.

dclamp,

where do get those idea from? No, seriously...
If you had taken some classes then I'm afraid you had a very lousy teacher - someone who doesn't know the real world application development process.
If you got it from some book(s) then perhaps you need to find a better reference.
This is no joke - it's a serious stuff. Even very experienced people cannot start database modeling without consulting business community first.
Also, modeling doesn't necessary means creating physical tables, etc...

I was told this by people who i was working on a project with. I was told that you should start with database design so when you start programming you have an idea of what needs to be done.

If you guys could help me,

I need to open a file, and if that file doesnt not exist then,
open another file, and if that one doesnt exist then,
open another file, and if that one doesnt exist, then....

etc...
how would i do this?

if you are doing this in Visual Basic .net then you need to ask this in the Visual Basic .net forums ;).

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Originally Posted by dclamp

I was told this by people who i was working on a project with. I was told that you should start with database design so when you start programming you have an idea of what needs to be done.

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Well, perhaps they need to educate themselves on the subject first and then give out advices. ;)

Anyway, best regards. :wave:

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Originally Posted by RhinoBull

But how in the world can you even start modeling your database if you know nothing (or very little) about the business that may ultimately run off of it?! :confused:

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aah, for personal projects I generally have an idea but no set business rules first. I do this because I tend to focus on what specific part of the programming language I want to learn. Since I am my own client, I tend to bend business rules as I see fit, that's why it's rather impractical if I make the entire business logic and rules before anything else.

However, real world projects are a different class entirely but I do like to shape the database alongside business logic.
As much as I can, I'd try to get a high level understanding of the application from the clients before modeling the database and constantly review that as the business rules gets cleared. Clients tend to be vague with their requirements as well.
:wave: