Path 2 Developer

I learned an important lesson. Actually, I learned a few lessons. The first lesson - always back up. Have copies of files if backing up isn't easy. Next, it's a good idea to not proceed too far without checking to make sure everything still work, while you can still undo something. Third, and more specifically, apparently, renaming certain items in Visual Studio can completely erase a design. Let me explain... To recap, Visual Studio is the IDE I use to write my programs. I'm learning the VB.Net programming language because that's the language the software my company maintains was written in. It makes sense to get more familiar with that. I'm still extremely  new to Visual Studio, and I'm very new to coding and general coding principles. I'm reading tons of books (often at the same time) to get general coding practices, as well as very specific programming details for VB.Net. All this combined to say, I'm still learning, and I'm really new. No...

I'm probably not done. I'm going to sit on this design for a day or two to see how it feels. I had a suggestion about adding a right triangle showing people base, slope, rise, angle, etc. I'm kind of torn on that part. In essence, this is probably about 90% done as far as the User Interface goes. I like it, I think. I'm hoping to be able to pass the keyboard strokes directly into the program, rather than have someone point and click. If I can get that done, the flow will be ten times better. I'm excited about the math involved and the fact that this will actually be functional. There are two things I'm struggling with right now. The first is the programming language. I've mentioned this before, I believe, but the programs my group works with are all programmed in VB.net. So, that's the language I'm learning right now. The problem, however, is that the system architect here at work is telling everyone that any new programs should be written in...

Okay, I've got my next great idea for my pet project. It's a little more complicated, but not terribly. My biggest complaint I had when I transferred from the Detailing Department to the Customer Service department was the loss of my trusty HP48G calculator. This thing was awesome! You calculated feet and inch calculations with formulas. The format was feet.inches and sixteenths. For instance, 14.0608 = 14'-6 1/2". The formulas removed parts of the inputted number and converted them from a foot to a number to add and subtract, and then reconverted the number to a foot answer to display. I and a colleague created several excel sheets that essentially did the same thing, but it just wasn't convenient and didn't flow very well. So, I'm going to create a program that looks close to this calculator. In addition to the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of feet-inch numbers, there were formulas that calculated roof slopes, weights, and...