For years now, I've been talking about creating some sort of project centered around music. The main idea was to create a website engine that could be used to easily build websites for musicians. It would contain all of the basic functionality needed by musicians. A few months back, I came up with the name Tremolo and started working on it. I put it on CodePlex, but never published it because I didn't have a lot of time to devote to it.

Recently, I decided to start work on it again and re-created the project on CodePlex. CodePlex has a policy where you have to publish a project after 30 days. After 30 days, I hadn't completed a lot of it but didn't want to restart the project. I figured that no one would find it so it probably wouldn't matter if I didn't have it done.

I checked on the stats today and found that a few people had found it. Apparently, the ASP.NET page on MSDN shows the most recent ASP.NET projects added to CodePlex, including mine.

I wasn't too pleased to see it since I haven't really got anything working yet. I've mostly been concentrating on creating the basic structure of the project and making sure that the build and setup scripts are running. One of the main goals of the project is to make it very easy to setup and build, and that part of it is done. There are build tasks to setup and migrate the database, run the unit tests and there will eventually be one for deployment as well. Apart from a couple minor issues, I've got NHibernate setup as well.

So, for anyone who may be interested in the project, I'll be posting updates here. I'm hoping to have the business layer completed after this weekend and the UI soon after that. If you've downloaded the project, sorry there's not much there yet :)

If you want to check the project out it's here - http://www.codeplex.com/tremolo.

If you're a web designer or work on web-based applications, you should really take the A List Apart Survey for people who make websites. 

I've been spending a lot of time with jQuery lately and have been really digging it. In fact, I'm doing a short grok talk on it for the Dayton .NET Developers Group at the end of this month.

Here's a short snippet I came up with to resize text boxes so that the width of the textbox would be proportional to the maximum number of characters allowed by the maxlength property on the textbox. It's not exact - through trial and error I figured out that 7.3 and 8 work as ratios for maxlength value to the corresponding width. That's based on the font I'm using and the size of the textboxes (smaller ones seem to have a slightly different ratio than larger ones). You'll probably have to tweak those values to get what you need, but it's a start.

          $('input[type=text]').each(function()
{ var max_length = $(this).attr('maxlength'); var multiplier = (max_length
> 10) ? 7.3 : 8; var w = (max_length * multiplier) +"px";
$(this).width(w);
});
        

Maybe I'm being a little picky here, but DotNetKicks seems like they have been pretty loose with their definition of what constitutes a .NET story.  I like having a feed to the site that aggregates a lot of different .NET topics, but it seems like there's been a lot of tangential sort of stories lately.  I mean stories on JavaScript frameworks, HTML or Windows are ok, but they're really not that focused on .NET. I wonder if it's just a case of people simply kicking stories that they like, regardless of the relevance.

It would be nice if there was a way to downvote some of the stories that weren't really relevant but I realize that opens a whole other can of worms.  I'll continue to support the site, but I may end up dropping it out of my feeds if the trend doesn't change.

Since I'm probably the last programmer on the web to write this post, I figured I'd finally get around to doing it.

How old were you when you started programming?

I dabbled a little bit when I was 10 or 11. My dad - a mechanical engineer - bought an IBM PC Jr. He knew a little C and Basic and I picked up on a few things. I also had some "Choose Your Own Adventure" type books where you had to write little Basic programs in order to progress in the book. For the life of me, I can't remember what they were called though. From there, I remember creating a program called "Froo" (presciently close to foo?) which was a series of ASCII art screens that told a story about an alien.

How did you get started in programming?

I started doing some HTML in college, making a website for my band, Red Earth. It was early enough that the first year I did it, I was viewing the site through a text-based browser. By the time I had graduated college with a secondary education degree, I had decided that it wasn't for me. I got a temp job doing data entry, which led to me a job doing release management. In that context, I was assisting someone who asked if I wanted to try some programming. I took to it pretty well.

What was your first language?

Basic when I was a kid, then a little VBScript/ASP when I started as a job. Perl was really where I cut my teeth though and was my first love.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Some sort of ASP website to display information entered from a VB 6 application.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Basic, VBScript, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Bash, C#, VB.NET, Ruby, PowerShell

What was your first professional programming gig?

I'd consider my first professional development gig to be when I got a few months into release management, when I started to do a lot of Perl development.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes. The major thing I would do different is that I would have gone to school for computer science. I've always felt that I've missed out by not getting formal training. There's no substitute for wanting to learn and taking it upon yourself to discover new ideas, but I would definitely have changed my major if I knew now what I know then.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Don't ever stop learning and trying to improve. This field moves so fast that you need to be aware of what's being discussed and what new ideas are being introduced. You don't want to be a magpie developer, but it's important to try out new things.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

Any time that I can implement a new idea successfully and the HTML renders correctly or the test goes green, I get a kick out of it. I still get a little bit of a thrill when stuff works. It's still a little bit magic to me.

I'd also say that working with Leon was always great. It was easy to get better at programming when I was sitting across the aisle from somebody who has as much passion about development as I do and wanted to learn just as much.