Visual Studio/Basic and C++
 

I'm downloading this programming package from Microsoft. I was looking for Visual Basic and found this instead. I haven't programmed in years. I used to write in Turbo Pascal and before that QuickBasic (prior to that DOS 2.0 and the interpreter, !!). I wonder how long it will take me to crash my pc, lol.

Just curious as to why you are downloading this. Just for fun?

I used Visual Studio for years until I retired.

Ummm, yeah, you may want to try and run things on a separate machine. Although unless you are really good, or extremely unlucky, there is probably not all that much you can do to permanently harm things. That said...do your backup man!

Just for the fun of it. Coding was my hobby for a while before I got back into playing.

I've coded in C, BASIC, COBOL, Pearl, Python, Javascript, Mathematica, and Matlab.

It can be fun.

If it's just for fun then I suggest you kick off with C#. In terms of what you can do with it, C# is pretty much the same as Visual Basic but is more logical and easier to write in.

C++ is best avoided unless you want a challenge. The learning curve is much steeper, and it takes more work to get things done.

I'll look at that, thanks. The first thing I have to do is figure out how to do "Hello World", lol. There's samples online so I'll take a peek.

It's not an understanding many have but at this point in history Microsoft is one of the top enterprise, cloud and mobile application companies. When their products are not stable it's almost always an individual's or some firm's doing a bad job.

With Windows 7 going to the history books in less than a year I'm well into replacing the old with new where we have 700+ employees. The stability, security and feature set with the new is much better.

For paragraph 1. In December I left for vacation with some new server and database instances running perfectly. Then our document management system's 3rd party programmers got to work. Last week it was a junk show where our document management vendor and Microsoft support did a really nice job of pointing out their achieving 10 on the 1-10 scale of being idiots who didn't read the documentation.

I hope they fix it before I have to tell the CFO what his pals actually did.