I have never really had to work with Object Oriented programming for anything in the real world before. I have studied the theoretical implementations as well as done the course work required to make it happen, but this weekend I am getting my first taste of actually having to implement a solution (to an actual problem) using the C# language. Not to go into too many details, but there is a streaming media service that works on the concept of a web browser platform and then gives info off to a Windows Media plugin. Well, before a few days ago Chris and I were using another tool to read this info and let it pass through to TVersity so that we could listen to the stream without having to use a PC. A few days ago the media provider decided to change their URLs and as a result broke the previous tool. Unfortunately, we didn’t write the original tool, so there was no way to change the URL being used. In general, this sucks. We made an attempt at using C++ so that we could use some of the same libraries that the existing tool used, but unfortunately, after 45 minutes I couldn’t manage to get Visual C++ to take a string declaration (since C++ doesn’t take STRING as a primitive type). Once we threw C++ out the window and switched to C# everything came together and now the app is coming along nicely. I still have no clue if it will work, or if it will be able to be converted easily to a Windows service, but the whole damn thing is pretty fun to work on. I always stayed clear of object oriented projects, but this is coming out so clean as a result of using the objects. The only thing I am regretting is my lack of knowledge of how to extend/inherit classes in C#. I’m sure I could do it, but I probably wouldn’t like the difficulty in managing the resources implemented higher up in the chain. We have a pretty neat class that works on some of the HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse stuff in .NET, and it would be really cool to simply extend it with new methods than make everything have to call back to it. I might have to work toward that once this application actually works.

I can’t believe that I haven’t taken time to write anything except GITI in the past few years, even though I obviously have the proper training to do pretty much anything I want in C# or Java (probably C++ too, but just not Visual, MS seems to have corrupted the zen of C++). I haven’t felt particularly useful in technical tasks lately, as in most of them, Chris is more talented than I could ever hope to be, but in the area of C++/C# programming, I seem to be the only one who has gotten then hang of the languages, although Chris has been very useful in figuring out certain things of logic.