Now I Am A C# Developer

It started with Instagram.

I wanted to be able to have my most recent Instagram picture become my background.

For my Android, tablet, that was easy. I just used IFTTT to connect the Instagram channel to the Android Device channel and that was that.

I wrote a Perl module, which I should put on GitHub and maybe then CPAN one of these days, that interacts with the Instagram API, and wrote a program that downloads the latest and uses gsettings to set it as background. That was easy, and I suppose I could use Strawberry Perl to make it all work on Win32, but I thought "Hey, Microsoft just told me that Visual Studio Community was free to use, and I just moved my laptop to Win10, so why not learn a thing?"

So, I learned a thing. I have used Visual Studio to write four C# programs:

• Hello World, because you need to learn how to do I/O and get the compiler to run
• Iterative Fibonacci, because you need to understand how to use control structures in a language
• Recursive Fibonacci, because you need to understand how to use subroutines in a language
• SetBackgroundImage, which used inputs and SystemParametersInfo to allow me to type a path to an image and set that as my background.

Before: picture of my whiteboard

After: another picture of my whiteboard

The only part of the source that I had more than minor interaction with is Program.cs, and that isn't much. I'm not a fan of default bracing style, having my own preferences, but knowing that Ctrl-K Ctrl-D (I think) will tidy whatever I write into correct formatting is a good thing.

I'm a vi man, so living la vida IDE is a stretch for me. I had to Google to find out how to turn on line numbers, but to be fair, I was not born with the knowledge of :se nu, either, so that's fair. I generally use Windows machines that give me a browser and PuTTY, which let me connect to real computers, so this is me learning how Windows does Windows.

Anyway, that's my code, up there on GitHub. If you have suggestions for program #5, I'm all ears.