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[ChrisF]

Right, let's get this ball rolling

I know there are quite a few of us on this forum that dabble in one way, or another (either as a hobby, or for a living), with a bit of coding so why not share your skills in here? Or maybe you want to tap up your fellow forumites for a bit of info on how to do something?

Doesn't matter what language you use (so long as it's not ML) - everyone can join in

As for me, what do I do? Well, I'm mostly .NET based. C#, VB.NET etc... have been more recently been doing WPF and WCF based work, as well as the usual ASP.NET.

I've also been touching (no pun intended) upon iPhone development of late, and have a couple of apps on the appstore. I know there are quite a few folk on here with published apps, and several more people are getting to grips with the SDK, so maybe we can bash around a few ideas

Anyway, I guess, to maybe get things started with a question... can anyone point me in the direction of a good introduction to OpenGL ES (i.e the variant on the iPhone) please? I know it's sufficiently different to regular OpenGL...

[demon9k]

I don't have an answer to your question but I'm interested to see how this thread goes.

I'm pretty much exactly the same as you, .net, sql. Currently doing a project in mono. Looking forward to working with serial ports in linux and windows

I'm also working on an iphone project at home, although I've not actually decided what I'm doing yet. We should all team up and make a super NTSC-UK app

[ChrisF]

How are you finding mono? Any issues?

Odd you say you're working with serial ports. I thought they were long done and dusted, but only last week I got asked, by the place I am currently at, if I had done any serial port programming! Must be some kind of revival going on

I did float the idea of an NTSC-UK reviews app (similar to the IGN one) a while back but nothing came of that.

[gunrock]

Ok, coderz.

I'm a Java programmer at a (shhhhh..) investment bank. Currently working with Eclipse and SWT (yuck!) and writing/improving the decoding of XML market data (never seems to end...)

Been working with Java since 2000 (only a few weeks ago found out what annotations are good for!) , though I had six months of .NET C# and nine months of Perl in there somewhere. Before that C, C++ on the PS1, N64 and PC as games programmer (though it's all ancient history, and I usually had to do the low-level CD/controller/memory card code, so I'm no 3d/physics wiz!).

What I'm really interested in is iPhone development, your impressions of the dev kit, the limitations and the realistic potential of making a bit of pocket money from your apps. How's that been, so far?

[demon9k]

How are you finding mono? Any issues?

Odd you say you're working with serial ports.......

I actually just started using mono today! Took one of our forms.net apps into mono and it seemed to work fine. Currently setting up a linux virtual machine for testing.

yeah the serial port is for a bioscience device. Quite an interesting project compared to the standard webshop/crm system we usually get.

You should get the NTSC review app idea floating around again I've not really got stuck into the iphone development yet but as gunrock says, whats it like?

[ChrisF]

Well... I'm used to Visual Studio. XCode is NO Visual Studio (imho!) Which kind of put me off on a bad footing with the iPhone SDK (XCode is the IDE that comes with it btw). I suppose it's due to not only using a different IDE, but a different OS at the same time. I'm not sure how it compares to Eclipse, but from my brief look at it, Eclipse has the edge on it too due to being able to customise it more. I did try and see if you could use Eclipse instead of XCode, but the only thing I could find at the time was being able to develop iPhone-aware websites with it (i.e the javascript side of things).

Anyway, the SDK is fairly feature rich. Easy enough to use, API-wise. However someone needs to have a word with Apple. Their examples are so over engineered it's untrue. My mate wanted an example of how to use one of the scroll view classes... 70mb download. If you want to find out how to do something simple then you have to wade through class upon class of what? Of nothing for the most part! Again, maybe I'm just used to the relative simplicity of MSDN. Although that's a bit too sparse sometimes For the most part though, you can find your way after a quick Google. It never used to be that way though until recently.

There is a steep learning curve, but again, that depends where you've come from. If you don't have much of an OO background then you may well struggle. A lot. Oh, it uses Objective-C btw. Which seems to be some kind of some bastard child of C and C++ but with more modern features (it has the equivalent of extension methods in .Net for example).

The one thing that I really find difficult with the SDK though is the lack of meaningful errors. More often than not you get a huge stack trace and a one liner saying ERR_BAD_ACCESS or some other helpful constant.

Bit of pocket money? Perhaps if you get the right app! Hope he doesn't mind me saying, but someone else on this forum's apps have made many many thousands. Mine have made me naff all I don't expect mine to tbh as I'm just tinkering of an evening/weekends.

It's fun to play with though, so if you have the hardware to run it, and some time to try it, then do grab the SDK as it's free (you just need to register as a developer).

[Brad]

oooh, how exciting. A programming thread!

Been a Software Engineer for about 15 years professionally. C and C++ mostly but I occasionally need to do Objective-C, Java, Ada and C# stuff. Mostly low level stuff like writing parsers to reverse engineer code into a UML modeling tool. I've done parsers for C, C++, Java and Ada. Currently doing distributed stuff for multi-core and multi-processing. Have skills in low level TCP networking comms so if the NTSC-UK app needs network code then count me in. Can also do collision detection stuff although the stuff I do is for precision rather than speed (simulating CNC mills cutting out engine blocks. No margin for error here!).

EDIT: Objective-C is the language of the gods but does require a mindset change. If you've doen any Smalltalk you'll be at home. C and C++ coders face a learning curve.

Also, the iPhone SDK is based around the regular OSX Cocoa Framework so to start with you can just try making some Mac applications.

[demon9k]

The one thing that I really find difficult with the SDK though is the lack of meaningful errors. More often than not you get a huge stack trace and a one liner saying ERR_BAD_ACCESS or some other helpful constant.

Sounds like silverlight, although to be fair I do like silverlight.

You guys are way more experienced that I am. I've just past the 4 years experience mark. Just got a promotion to technical lead though so pretty chuffed with that.

Looks like we're building a team already

[gunrock]

Interesting stuff

More interesting stuff

Thanks chaps. I've not done Objective-C before, but have done some Smalltalk, so that may help (and I have to interface a massive smalltalk app at work, so I'm still vaguely adept at reading smalltalk code).

I used to "live" in Visual Studio, but I get used to new stuff fairly quickly, so the IDE shouldn't be too much of a block.

I've been professionally programming for 19 years and bedroom coding since the 8-bits, so I'm pretty adept at learning new languages/paradigms. I haven't done any home projects in many years (since homebrew Dreamcast), but I'm thinking of getting my hands dirty again.

Ta.

[kernow]

Well, I recently finished my crap tool for keeping my projects in order, its just a massive bash script that I've probably re-written about 10 times over the last 3 years, but the good thing is that the project files itself are in the repository created by the same tool. I always find it impressive when a project comes along to the point where you can start using it while its still in development. It doesn't even have any versioning control as such which is probably what I'll work on next.

Its just like a crap version of CVS or something where you can check in projects, check them out as directories or tarballs etc and find out information about them, I'll never release it as people would laugh, plus its not useful to anyone else apart from me, but I like that I can just put a project.info (or whatever you called it in the config) with a bit of information into a directory, and be able to check it in, or turn it into a tarball or whatever.

I know its just an interface for standard shell commands, but I've found it useful at least, before I used to have a big directory full of my failed or half finished projects, now I have an organised 'repository' with all my stuff in , including my CV and even my home directory as a backup. its become more useful than I originally imagined, but it could do with some kind of per-file version control or checking at least. Maybe some kind of checksumming algorithm, I've never worked it out yet.

[averybluemonkey]

Eclipse used to be complete ***** 5 years ago. The number of times it just wouldn't read stack frames drove me round the bend. Once it even wiped out a days coding due to a poxy bug in it's local history management. Started using it 6 months ago now and it seems they've got it into a decent shape at last.

[gunrock]

Eclipse used to be complete ***** 5 years ago

Yeah I first looked at it around version 2 and it was terrible (especially having come from IntelliJ's IDEA; a vastly superior IDE), but it has got much, much better. Having said that though, it still has quite a few bad moments of it's own, still.

About to test drive 3.5 (Gallileo), but hanging fire for a bit as it's only been out a day or so!

[kernow]

best IDE I ever used was turbo pascal 7 for dos .. cough

[Matt]

I used to program, many many moons ago. I left programming in 1998, or was it 97? Been a long time anyway, and good riddance! Was doing all kinds of stuff before - C, some really low level embedded stuff on custom made broadcast satellite equipment, even some 6800 on the Amiga when I was still doing games.

I occasionally get the urge to dabble, but even then you won't get me looking at anything more complex than VB Er, maybe a little PHP if that counts

TBH I enjoyed the problem solving element of it, breaking a task down to core components, the logic issues. But once I'd mentally solved the problem, I found the implementation tiresome. Programming just didn't sit right with me.

[ShadowDancer]

Damn..I lost it all.

I spent a-lot of time with the Tandy trs-80 when I was a child. Even learnt Graphic strings and could write little programs.

Learnt stuff from books and typing in written programs. That was so much fun. I really wish I kept this stuff up.