And then I discovered the keystone: the Model-ViewModel-Model pattern. It’s not that often that I get physically excited about something programming-related. Call me a dork, but I did a little fist pump while thinking about MVVM in the car one day.

What’s really exciting about all this the speed at which the new WPF front end for OrtzIRC is being developed. After just a few weeks of porting, the new front end is almost at the same functionality level as the old Winforms front end. And that’s as a WPF noob.

In other news, I’ve started another programming project. I’m making an IRC client in .NET/C#. I’m going to model it after the popular mIRC/NNS combo. Basically I’m going to take the best parts of mIRC/NNS, remove the fluff that nobody uses (or that I don’t, at least), and hopefully. It will basically be a client for people who keep IRC open 24/7. For “power users” if you want to put it that way.

This will be my first proper non-web app, and my first time doing sockets (if you don’t count that IRC bot I made in PHP). One thing I’m trying to change with this project is the fact that I never finish anything. Hopefully announcing it like this will help with that. I really wanted to use WPF but I want to opt for “finishing” rather that getting it exactly the way I want it, since I don’t know that much about WPF. Another way I want to accomplish that is by planning out exactly what the first version will look like so I have something to shoot for. Although, I have never done that before. If you have any links or suggestions I’m all ears! (PS, I turned CAPTCHA off) Hopefully I can do proper versioning too. I’m not too big on planning. D:

I’m still working on the new version of the site (in CodeIgniter) but don’t expect it any time soon.

I’m currently in the process of rewriting my entire site using the CodeIgniter framework. Not counting my blog and the forums, that is. Actually, I’m not sure if I want to keep the forums up. Nobody uses them, and frankly there’s no reason anyone would want to. And now that I think about it, some sort out shoutbox would probably work just as well. I’ll have to think about it. I’d appreciate any suggestions too.

CodeIgniter has been really fun to work with. This is my first experience with a web framework (apart from Ruby on Rails, which didn’t go so well… something about “convention over configuration” seems a bit communist) and MVC is really awesome. For the first time, I have a feeling like I really know what I’m doing and I’m not just a noob anymore. I think it might be because MVC was sort of an epiphany for me as a programmer.

I’ve decided to be more proactive with learning PHP; trying to learn the sort of things that didn’t really interest/concern me when I was just doing it for fun. Design patterns, for instance. I want to eventually get ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer). Which means I may end up starting on my own framework in the near future. I want to start doing doing freelance online. My biggest obstacle right now is a lack of real experience and, unfortunately, confidence.

As far as non-web programming is concerned, I’ve recently become interested in GUIs, both designing them and implementing them. Usability issues have always interested me because psychology has always interested me as well, and the two seem to go hand-in-hand. I mentioned before that I wanted to mess around with WPF a bit, which I still haven’t gotten around to, unfortunately.

For the most part, my two week experience was fun. I’ve used Linux as a desktop before, but I’d always get bored and boot back into Windows. The biggest frustration for me is not in any configuration that has to be done, it’s in the lack of good apps. (Believe it or not, the fact that an app is running on Linux does not automatically make it awesome.) For instance, Bluefish. Cool at first, until you realize how buggy it is. When using parentheses the highlighting sometimes breaks and leaves part of your file completely unformatted. You can fix it by hitting F5 to refresh, but this is a huge annoyance. Bluefish has other annoyances, but these are mostly missing features that I would like to have, like the ability to reorder the tabs for open files. The file explorer seems completely broken too. I eventually installed Notepad++ in Wine. It sounds like I’m bashing Bluefish, but it’s actually the best editor for web development that I’ve found for Linux. I like gedit for editing other files, but I need a file explorer sidebar for web development.

I think what this comes down to is the number of “windows developers” versus the number of “linux developers”. Windows just has tons more people making apps than Linux. People talk a lot about the market share of linux/windows users, but I would be interested in some numbers involving the number of people who can program for Linux. Unfortunately I’m not in that second category. Mostly because I’m pretty hard against learning C++ unless it’s taught to me. C++ programming just seems like a whole lot of non-fun. I want to implement features, not debug endlessly and muck around with garbage collection. I really want to learn D, but right now it seems like the D community is geared toward attracting C and C++ programmers and not newbies developers (which, despite a few years of web development and screwing around with .NET, I still consider myself).

As far as Windows goes, I’ve really been itching to give XNA another go. I’ve sort of lost interest in making any games in XNA but I still want to mess with it. I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at making a GUI system. Or just mess around with 2D physics again. I also want to give WPF a try. From the short glance I’ve given it, I looks a bit like XNA for desktop apps. Which sounds awesome.

Wow, that was a big post.

Edit: Turns out gedit has a plugin system (cool) and there’s a file explorer plugin. I’ll have to check that out.