What was your first programming project?

[bgmacaw]

In this thread, Kleinma makes a good point about novice programmers biting off more than they can chew as a first project, particular if they're trying to write a complex game or something like that.

So, I thought I'd ask here what your first 'real world', personal, programming project was. By that I mean something outside of academic work or a programming job.

Did it get completed? Did you learn a lot from it? What was it? What did you write it in?

My first such project was, yes, a game, an adventure style text game for the Timex Sinclair. It was a pretty short adventure since I only had 2k of memory to work with. I did learn a good bit from it though.

[techgnome]

honestly, I can't remember that far back.... I'm pretty sure it was some sort of text based game too... I know I've done text games, ASCII games... sprite games... and every single one of them sucked more than a Hoover.

The first project I did for outside consumption was a tracking system for yearbook sales at my high school.

-tg

[dclamp]

Well i remember that my dad would make programs in VB5 on his computer for Trade shows for his company, and I loved watching him make them because it was interesting, so i asked if he can put it on my computer and....

from there i really just make the interface, and he would add basic programming to it. After watching him do this, i learned, and caught on fast. Now thanks to him i have possibly have found my career in life

[Lord Orwell]

It was a commodore 64 game called "highway to work" in which you drove a car up a scrolling road (2d duh) and avoided the huge number of potholes. I consider this my first project because it was the first one i completed that had sound in it.

[penagate]

Web browser shell. I learnt a lot from it; mostly, just how little a coder can actually do on their own. I never finished it.

I still bite off far more than I can chew, though.

[Hack]

A database program using dBASE II (back in 1982) that automated the budget preparation process for my department.

[SeanK]

A warehouse inventory system using VB3 and Access 2.0

[Slaine]

A text adventure game, on the Commodore 16.

Later ported to the Dragon 32 and BBC B.

This was followed by a snake game.

The one I most proud of though was a later one, which was a game of life simulation on the BBC B, written entirely in assembler and worked in real time.

[Atheist]

I started 2 years ago with VB6, I think I made some kinda IE shell, 6 months later i jumped to VB .Net, and here I am.

Why cant I too have a great story to tell

[tr333]

I started out creating a simple program for sending e-mails using cdosys in VB.NET. I use it every time i'm learning a new language, the first program always being a clone of this program. It's always useful for showing the similarities and differences in each language for doing specific tasks.

[Mark Gambo]

Here is my first program which was written in C Programming Language:

#include <stdio.h>
 
main()
{
  for(;;)
      { 
          printf ("Hello World!\n");
      }
}

[Lord Orwell]

I had a couple of text adventures i was working on also, but since i ripped the parser source code from someone else (a text adventure called Hospital), i don't count them. I do however remember the first program i wrote that did nothing but make me feel good:
10 print "John";
20 goto 10

later i expanded it to detect key presses, then later still showed how many times it printed my name with a counter loop. etc. Breaking into OOP from basic 2.0 and 6510 assembly was not easy.

[abhijit]

So, I thought I'd ask here what your first 'real world', personal, programming project was. By that I mean something outside of academic work or a programming job.

Did it get completed? Did you learn a lot from it? What was it? What did you write it in?

It was a keylogger. It was very lame and did not work. I wrote it entirely in VB using windows API calls. It was buggy and I never got around to fixing it.

[8bangerstang]

In this thread, Kleinma makes a good point about novice programmers biting off more than they can chew as a first project, particular if they're trying to write a complex game or something like that.

So, I thought I'd ask here what your first 'real world', personal, programming project was. By that I mean something outside of academic work or a programming job.

Did it get completed? Did you learn a lot from it? What was it? What did you write it in?

My first such project was, yes, a game, an adventure style text game for the Timex Sinclair. It was a pretty short adventure since I only had 2k of memory to work with. I did learn a good bit from it though.

My first project. Was a yahoo games Id grabber and spammer.. went from room to room switching id, rooms and servers.. Killed the dupes when saving.. and Also put in the first ever option to Steal tables as they were created.. as a user created a table the bots would auto join the table and start a game.. haha..

Was a neat program..

[Lord Orwell]

you're so cool...

my first qbasic program took a 24-bit .bmp and let you replace 3 bits of the color depth with your own information, basically letting you hide files inside the bitmap. Believe me, your eyes can't tell the difference between 21 and 24 bit.
my first complete program written in vb5 was a program for aol chatrooms. It detected when someone started scrolling crap off the screen, and automatically ignored them. I still have that source code, but it doesn't work in newer versions of AOL since they use custom message numbers in their windows in a useless attempt to stop 3rd-party programs from linking in to them.

[oceanebelle]

It was C Program about simulating a student record or something using lots of pointers and structural programming. I really forgot. LOLz I was in 3rd year computer science in the university and some team from the Computer Engineering Department want some small coding job done for their project for a fee (1500PHP). I finished the program and was paid the fee.

Next was my first application in VB using SQL Server as back-end database for the final project of students of Information Technology from another school.
I was still learning VB then, since I was not given much VB projects at work. It was a class management system complete with testing modules. I was able to finish since I got rather obsessed with it. lolz. No fee though since it was my younger sister's request. She is IT but she got nothing out of it whatsoever.

[CodedFire]

Mine was a calculator with a win Form. It was alot harder than i thought, obviously not the calculator part but the GUI. little things like double clicking the = button or say the * realy screwed my app up.

I think everyone should build a GUI calculator. There is so much learning in it that you would be supprised!

[sevenhalo]

I had to draw an animated 2d city with LogoWriter. Mind you, I was in 3rd grade.

[Wiz Kid]

My first programming project was a text-editor. I think text-editors are a good way of getting beginners interested. Just invoking simple properties of the RichTextBox got me interested in vb.net!

[Fazi]

My first project w...a...s. Yah Actually, I did not started with my first project. I directly went to my Second Project

So i cant comment. sorry.

[Fazi]

Hah, That was a JK. sorry.

I just did a Prayer Time Table using VB6 way back in 1999. I put all twelve months schedule in Twelve forms . I Prompt the user to select the month which he want to see the prayer time (No detection of Current date or time) . user select the month and i load the perticuler month form with an MMC Control sound of 'Call to Prayer' .

Before learning VB6. I learned Pascal,Basic,Foxpro,Dbase etc in the DICS. Except Class excercises, no external projects

[jermaine]

My first project, was a text editor and a webbrowser. I was working on 2 at one tme.

[psychotomus]

First program was a program when you clicked a command button in VB3, it would show a porno picture =)

first real project was an AOL module called "Riddlebox" that me and another guy "Nexus" programmed.

[daniel_gileta]

A tabbed web browser....
advanced!

[JuggaloBrotha]

The first language I started in was QBasic 1.1, I couldn't tell you what the program did since I was 12 back when I wrote it.

Unless batch files count, I started tweaking and writing those back when I was 10

[Max Peck]

My first commercial programming projects were for a company called Energy Management Associates back in 1978. Writing sections of code for a large power-plant simulation called Promod III. The entire thing was written in FORTRAN IV. We ran the simulation on Prime minicomputers and could compile it to run on IBM 360's.

My first large program on a PC was a text editor called "ED" which was written in IBM PC Basic (later compiled MS Basic) under PC DOS 1.1. I still keep a copy of ED on my machines today; still runs in a DOS session!

-MP

[Lord Orwell]

I wrote a program for c=64 that was offered to be published by loadstar magazine in 1989. It was called highway to work and it was basically a sprite car driving up a road with random potholes on it. The road was character art and the potholes were * (which is huge on a c-64). I wrote the road-scrolling-up routine in assembly but the rest of the program ran in basic. Unfortunately for my wallet, Loadstar was changing management and they sent me a retraction letter saying the game was too simple for a disk format and i should submit it to a magazine.

[Nightwalker83]

I think the first project I tried to create was a instant messenger application in VB6! However, I gave up on it before a finished creating it.

[Psyrus]

I think my very first project was a calculator written in C. It was crappy and only did basic math. The first code I ever wrote was of course a "Hello World" program.

My first paid gig was a website that I created for a landscaping firm. I got $100 per page. Of course I tried to convince them that a multi-page website was in their best interest.

I still have a lot of half-finished projects lying around only taking up space.

[Lord Orwell]

I think my very first project was a calculator written in C. It was crappy and only did basic math. The first code I ever wrote was of course a "Hello World" program.

My first paid gig was a website that I created for a landscaping firm. I got $100 per page. Of course I tried to convince them that a multi-page website was in their best interest.

I still have a lot of half-finished projects lying around only taking up space.

i custom created some functions that treated numbers as strings and then performed math on them the same way a human does. carry the one, etc. Side effect? No limit on how big the numbers could be.

[SLH]

I did a few basic 'you control a circle who has to avoid a bouncing, growing square' type games first (in RM BASIC!).
Every time i learn a new language i remake the old bouncing square game.

The first non-trivial thing i wrote was Gems N Rocks:

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=253989

[Jenner]

My first actual program besides stupid stuff was a little choose-your-own-adventure type game program written in Apple 2e BASIC based on the Transformers. It was over 300 lines of code.

My first program that actually mattered to anything or anyone was a graphical (i.e. non-text based) version of Connect 4 that was written in Apple Basic on an Apple 2e in 10th grade as my final assignment. It was a 2-player game.

My first programming management project was organizing and programming an LPMUD called TimeWarp MUD. It started off with me and another mudder I know from a different game, grew to 6 programmers after the first month and upwards of about 20 the following. Since the guy I started with had no desire to manage anything, I pretty much assumed role of project manager and directed it's construction. It was written in an internal C derivative called LPC

My first professional program was a ambulance logging and routing program done through the school written in VB6. It really was "bit off more than we could chew" both for me as a programmer and for the industrial engineering professors who later realized that their routing mathematics worked well for towmotors shop floors set up like grids, but lousy on city streets which can curve all other the place. At least I got paid for the junk I was able to cobble together.

My first successful professional program was when I was working for Chrysler, I wrote a program to import text files generated by a CMM into an Access database and select and graph the results. It was written in Access's VBA. I tried to make a VB6 version, but Crystal couldn't do nearly the reporting that Access had available at the time so it was scrapped.

[rogermusad]

How can i forget ?

Converting Numbers to Number words...
835 to Eight hundred and Thirty Five ......upto 10 digits or more ....

[BillGeek]

What do you consider programming?

My first "code" I wrote was a DOS Batch-shell:

@ECHO OFF
CLS
ECHO * * * * * * *
ECHO * Installer *
ECHO * * * * * * *
XCOPY <sourcefile> <destinationfile>
ECHO <sourcefile> Copied.

etc...

After that I started learning QBASIC (never did anything, but learnt nonetheless) and then VB6. My first official coding and compiling project was a turn-based quiz game for a junior developer competition at my school. I got the lowest marks because I didn't have supporting documentation or commented code.

[Gambit001]

random number generater for lottery type application, it simply choose 6 unique random numbers between 1-49

i failed it as they proved my code wrong as it generated the same number twice it did win the best looking app though - just a pity it didnt work lol

[Shaq]

My first project was called Piggie Poundage. It wasn't my idea, it was the first assignment in my programming class. You had to input the quantities of different foods and how many calories each food had. Then it calculated how many miles you had to run to burn it off.

[DeanMc]

First proper project was this: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=541447 but nobody used it!

[VBFiEND]

My first project was making a chat spammer that spammed out different phrases every few minutes, It was actually made for a porn site who was looking for something of the sort and It was for AOL/AIM Chat rooms, It was to advertise there site all day.

I got 50 dollars for it and it was pretty decent. (Made in visual basic 6.0)
This was also about 3 years ago.

[Lord Orwell]

My first project was making a chat spammer that spammed out different phrases every few minutes, It was actually made for a porn site who was looking for something of the sort and It was for AOL/AIM Chat rooms, It was to advertise there site all day.

I got 50 dollars for it and it was pretty decent. (Made in visual basic 6.0)
This was also about 3 years ago.

you suck. do you realize that teen rooms and younger were spammed like this? This is the main reason aol went to the irc-style "moderator" in each room, giving members the ability to boot other members.


.
.
.
fortunately i also wrote a program for aol. It detected keywords, repeated phrases, etc, and auto-ignored people.

But since we're talking about aol programs, i never understood why people felt it necessary to troll the chatrooms to get email addresses. All you had to do was visit the room list and you could get a list of everyone in the room. Tell me there is any kind of legitimate use for that power! Anyway starting with 7.0 (i think) they changed to custom numbers in their chat window so it wouldnt respond to standard windows messages anymore. Really didnt make any difference since eventually people decoded the new ones, but all was quiet for a little while.

Also oddly, they used an activex dll in their app with the ability (among other things) to sign on. I wonder if anyone ever made use of it? I discovered it on accident while i was hexing the program to let it run more than one instance. Didnt really work too well though. In some cases, changing a combobox on one instance was reflected on another. I would guess it was broadcasting window messages.