It’s been a long time since I’ve written a program. I finally finished one for our local golf association, but it took far longer than expected. Basically, it took two weeks to do what should have taken two hours. We have a DOS-based program on the computer to sort through names and handicaps to build teams for the weekend group. We all throw some money in the pot, and while we’re playing, the manager runs the names and teams are formed. Unfortunately, the program gets confused when names are deleted, or added after other actions have been run. I offered to put a new Windows-based program together. The Windows environment isn’t friendly for programming print operations, and that still needs work in my program.
I’ve worked with FORTRAN, BASIC, QBASIC, C++, and Visual Basic. All are similar, but each has its quirks. The biggest problem I ran into with this project was dealing with a grid control. The MS VB FlexGrid doesn’t allow edits within the grid itself, so everything I had to work with (data) could really only be displayed in the grid. It offered no other functionality that I could see. And printing, as I mentioned, isn’t as straight-forward as it is in BASIC, for example. I haven’t yet figured out how to TAB in my printouts like I could in “plain ol’ BASIC” with a Tab(20) command to go to the 20th column.
And it has been frustrating going through the MSDN documentation–“TAB” has so many variants. And web searches take me to a lot of sites with lots of information, most of which is way beyond the simple tasks I’m working.
Well, the program works. I still have some refinements to work on, but the core is in place. And I’m re-learning my programming skills. It ain’t like riding a bike!