Languages to learn for making programs - windows

I was just wondering what languages you guys would suggest I learn if I wanted to make a program like the sticky notes program on Windows. I'm fairly new to program making (more of a website development guy) as if you couldn't already tell.
Thank you guys so much!
~ Darren :)

Related

Learning Windows Batch File Scripting

What would be the best course for me to take in regards to learning how to script with Windows? I am a beginner and would like an accelerated course or list of great informational steps to take to become an advanced scripter. In all areas of Windows. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
PowerShell is what you want to learn. Google, notepad and experimentation. I'm sure there are great books as well, but find a tutorial or two and you will be off to the races.
A good starting point could be this=>
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/scriptcenter/powershell.aspx

Ruby GUI (non-complex layouts)

I've done quite a bit of research on Ruby GUI design, and it appears to be the one area where Ruby tends to be behind the curve. I've explored the options of MonkeyBars, wxRuby, fxRuby, Shoes, etc. and was just wanted to get some input from the Ruby community.
While they're definitely usable, the development on each seems to have fallen off. There is not a great deal of useful documentation or user bases that I could find on any (minus the fxRuby book). I'm just looking to make a simple GUI, so I don't really want to spend hundreds of hours learning the intricacies of the more complex tools or attempt to use something that is no longer even being developed (Shoes is the type of application I'm looking for, but it's extremely buggy and not being actively developed.) Out of all of the options, which would you guys recommend as being the quickest to pick up and that still has some sort of development base?
Thanks!
I don't know what you mean by Shoes being extremely buggy. It works perfectly fine for building your own little application :-)
Yes there are problems with shoes3 and packaging/installer. However the community is one of the nicest I ever saw. Always nice and helpful figuring out problems. You can reach the mailing list at shoes#librelist.com.
If you're looking for basic information Nobody Knows Shoes and the shoes manual are your best friends.
However we are currently working on shoes 4 - which is a complete rewrite having multiple backends in mind - first backend being jruby/swt
So I would definitely recommend shoes :-)
Shoes on!
I've been looking at similar needs and am considering picking up a javascript gui library like Dojo or Sproutcore; or using JRuby + Netbeans for a Java based GUI.
For me, Aptana was a nice environment to start trying the javascript libraries to test the pain starting the learning curve. I'm still trying to find time to finsh my comparison.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming/GUI_Toolkit_Modules
might help
limelight looks interesting
You might try:
DialogBlocks to create an XRC file using wxWidgets / wxRuby
xrcise - to create a ruby file to load the XRC
I am faced with the task of writing many small GUI's and a few
that are complicated. The above has worked for me. While the
above works on Windows, I can only vouch for the Linux implementations
which work very nicely.
FYI: DialogBlocks will run you about $100. It will create C++
or XRC files. It is also good at switching platforms. I think
there's a demo version.
My version info:
ruby 1.9.1p243
wxWidgets 2.8.10
wxRuby 2.0.1
DialogBlocks 4.28
wx_sugar 0.1.22 (for xrcise)

Learning Cappuccino

What is the best source to learn Cappuccino? I do "traditional" web development, but i'm very interested in this new framework. Please note that I have no knowledge of Objective-C.
As mentioned above, the website is a good place, but there are also some other good resources:
http://cappuccinocasts.com/ (screencasts)
http://www.nice-panorama.com/Programmation/cappuccino/
http://www.littletreesoftware.com/blog/
http://theocacao.com/document.page/593
There are a few others too, and many of them are linked to from the site.
I wrote a real life cappuccino tutorial based on an actual customer project: http://www.springenwerk.com/2009/09/real-life-cappuccino-tutorial-part-1.html
On the tutorials is says:
A great introduction to Objective-J. Familiarity with JavaScript is recommended, prior knowledge of Objective-C not required.
http://cappuccino.org/learn/tutorials/
It seems the website is a good place to learn. Interesting framework.
You also have http://www.cappuccino-project.org/learn/
It is our new work-in-progress website. Not complete at all, it still has some very basic tutorials to help you starting coding with Cappuccino
I recently took up learning cappuccino. I found the Cappuccino Casts and the tutorials on cappuccino.org, however, like you, I come from a web development background - not cocoa / desktop apps.
Following some online tutorials was good to a degree, but I felt I lacked fundamental knowledge about the Objective-C and Cocoa and Cappuccino is modelled so closely to it. I bough a copy of Aaron Hillegass' book called "Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X" here: http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-3rd/dp/0321503619/ref=pd_sim_b_3 which I felt really helped with my base understand of application development rather than traditional web development.
I would definitely recommend giving it a read, I worked my way through it in a few days and thought it gave enough knowledge to understand what all the Cappuccino stuf was about.
I recently found that when I install Cappuccino from source, there is a fairly significant amount of code to learn from hidden away in <install-dir>/Cappucino/Tests/Manual
There is a wealth of code there that isn't advertised anywhere but is certainly good enough to learn from. Just drop the Frameworks next to the index.html file in each test folder and open up and learn!

Integrate with the Windows Shell

OK,
I want to create a windows shell extention that sits in the file menu much like the "Tortorise SVN" menu.
Does anyone know where I'd begin, a good article, or what interfaces to implement?
Thanks!
It's pretty straight forward actually. It's about a 3-4 step process. You didn't specify what language you were using.
Here's how to do it in native code:
http://www.kbcafe.com/articles/HowTo.Shell.pdf
Here's how to do it with .NET. Note that it is essentially the same as doing it with native code.
http://www.theserverside.net/tt/articles/showarticle.tss?id=ShellExtensions
Ah... Shell extensions... they can be a real pain in the butt if they're complicated, but you can do so much neat stuff. A great place to start is Mike Dunn's Complete Idiot's Guide To Writing Shell Extensions on codeproject.com.
There's an O'Reilly book called VB Shell Programming which goes into the API's in some depth. As the title suggests, it's aimed at Visual BASIC, but the API's are exposed through COM and the techniques discussed in the book are applicable for pretty much anything that supports COM. A quick look on Amazon.com suggests you can probably pick up a secondhand copy for a few dollars.
Avoid codeproject (for kids, full of bugs) and read the complete doc of MSDN on SNE.

Project in Ruby

I've been coding alot of web-stuff all my life, rails lately. And i can always find a website to code, but i'm kind of bored with it. Been taking alot of courses of Java and C lately so i've become a bit interested in desktop application programming.
Problem: I can't for the life of me think of a thing to code for desktop. I just can't think of anything i can code that isn't already out there for download. So what do i do?
I need some project suggestions that i can set as a goal.
I would say you should roam through github or some other open source site and find an existing young or old project that you can contribute to. Maybe there is something that is barely off the ground, or maybe there is a mature project that could use some improvement.
I find to complete a project, it needs to be something I am passionate about. I feel you need to find your own project I'm afraid.
There is always the Netflix Prize though!
I would write a ray tracer.
Oops, sorry... you're looking for an original idea. :) Ray tracers are still cool, though, and easy to get started on. Maybe you'll get an idea for a game while you're working on it.
Visit shoooes.net for a UI toolkit that's easy and fun, and then the-shoebox.org to see the kinds of things people are doing with it.
If you could make a Ruby ANSI (and xbin, and idf, and adf...) Editor, I would love you. Because that means you would have written ANSI parsing routines that I can hope you release to the open source community.
... but that is a selfish answer. Oh, and a cross-platform editor would be nice as well (although TundraDraw somewhat takes care of that).

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