C# / Azure - Help
-
I've been working on C# for about 3 - 4 years professionally but I still feel like I have gaps in my knowledge or that I know C# superficially. The reason I think I feel this way is because I have used only a very limited subset of the language and the .NET Framework professionally. Most things I've worked on were usually glorified CRUD applications, and the language features that I could use were severely limited by whatever were company-wide practices at that time. I've read the books and I promptly forget most of the stuff in a couple weeks and the Idea of "Build something that you feel like doing" is not that motivating. I've built couple things that I thought I could put on Github but the motivation fizzled out.
I'd like to get more comfortable with the language by building something that touches most features of the language and the .NET framework would really help. I've tried simple things like To-Do lists and day planners and what not. The simpler it is the faster the motivation dies. Is there any sufficiently complex hobby projects that you've done that helped you nail you understanding of .NET better? I'd love to hear them.
PS: I'd prefer to hear something that's worked for you and not a generic idea that seems interesting. I don't mind if your projects are not .NET specific either. ALso if it includes Azure that would be even more awesome.
-
@stillwater I didn't finish it, but it was in C#. I made my own interface for an APC SmartUPS. They use MODBUS over USB (and the protocol is sort-of available) so that's quite a fun thing to write a communications engine for. For the graphics I got into GDI+ which was quite fun, there are so many graphics drawing techniques and it's chock full of recursive stuff and things I'd never even heard of before like Dijkstra's algorithm.
I think something similar but with WPF and EntityFramework would be a bit of exercise for quite a wide swath of C# and the framework.
Edit: Or maybe stick with GDI+ for the excercise, I would definitely move to EF rather than the janky flat-file CSV thing I made though :)
-
@Cursorkeys It sounds difficult but at the least interesting.
-
@stillwater I wrote an app that procedurally generated interesting looking images. I still break it out every so often. The original plan was to write it in shader language, but I started it pre-XNA and it turned out that was really nasty to do in C# so I instead wrote "virtual shaders" and ran them in threads. Slower, but the result is cool.
I also wrote one that converts between Gregorian dates -> Julian Day Number -> Mayan Long Count -> Tzolkin -> Haab' when I was on my Maya kick a few years back.
I used to have them all on Google Code, but then Google deleted them or whatever so fuck that. I mean I still have them but I don't bother putting them on any code sharing site.
-
@blakeyrat said in C# / Azure - Help:
I also wrote one that converts between Gregorian dates -> Julian Day Number -> Mayan Long Count -> Tzolkin -> Haab' when I was on my Maya kick a few years back.
This sounds cool. I'll probably try something like this, maybe something like NodaTime. Should flex my C# muscles enough.
@blakeyrat said in C# / Azure - Help:
I used to have them all on Google Code, but then Google deleted them or whatever so fuck that
-
Recently I wrote some basic tools to generate a sphere out of cubes and a 2d tile-based map generator, which have been rather fun. One thing I'd like to do is build a node-based world generator, where everything is vector, and then make a system for describing the environments it makes in English. I feel like you could make some interesting things with a system like that.
But none of those really get you through all the parts of .NET of course. If you want to do that, you'd need to do something like write an ASP.NET WebAPI app hosted in Azure to act as a server for clients written in MVC5 and UWP with different focuses: Maybe the web one shows data about some kind of description of things, or a top-down view, and the UWP app is the actual game or something. Or maybe do what you can to make large portions of the server Azure Functions, and ride the true bleeding edge.
That'd certainly be resume-building.
-
@Magus said in C# / Azure - Help:
One thing I'd like to do is build a node-based world generator, where everything is vector, and then make a system for describing the environments it makes in English. I feel like you could make some interesting things with a system like that.
I built like... 80% of one years and years ago, I was going to use it for a MUD.
The idea was you could have a "fully destructible MUD" if instead of rooms, the MUD kept track of polygons and points, and then had an engine to describe any particular point of the world to the player. That way if a player cut down a tree, the MUD could just add a stump to that location that'd be there forever without admins having to manually do it (like we did when I admined a RP MUD.) It also lets you do things like have a player flying without creating thousands of pointless "sky" rooms, or digging underground, etc.
Sadly that code's long gone I think. There's a lot of interesting problems relating to it. (Like you're "inside" a structure but you can see out a window, for example. Or how does it determine how visible something is? Maybe the castle towers can be seen for miles. Or having "fields" of particular landscape that aren't materialized until needed (like the cutting down a tree example-- kind of like ground clutter in PC games, but then you need to track that bit of clutter from then on if the player digs hole or cuts some grass).
-
@Magus said in C# / Azure - Help:
Maybe the web one shows data about some kind of description of things, or a top-down view, and the UWP app is the actual game or something. Or maybe do what you can to make large portions of the server Azure Functions, and ride the true bleeding edge.
That'd certainly be resume-building.That's a lot. This should definitely help build the resume, help with some github-whoring, and the whole works.
-
@blakeyrat What with Unity being around these days, stuff like this is probably a lot of fun .
-
@stillwater said in C# / Azure - Help:
Is there any sufficiently complex hobby projects that you've done that helped you nail you understanding of .NET better?
I cobbled together a IRC chatbot a while ago using several pieces and parts. Getting all the different components working together better than thee samples was challenging and resulted in clear progress.
-
I downloaded a Serverless functions cookbook and working through the examples right now. The examples touch on other parts of Azure too. Seems fun so far.
-
@blakeyrat Where is that site you had that generated images? Google didn't help me remember that URL.
-
@sockpuppet7 The domain name expired years ago so it's gone.
It was called "pngky" IIRC.
