what's this for? / a little about me...

So, I created this blog so that I could use it to hopefully better hone my limited skills in C#.  My skills probably fall somewhere between beginner and intermidiate, so anything a "good" coder would think is useful to me would be greatly appricated.  :)

I'm currently spearheading a project called Movinator which is being hosted on GotDotNet.com.  This is a silly program that I'm using to teach myself more about coding databases and interaction with them.  I'm using C# for the main program, and MySql as the database backend.  So far, I've met with some limited success with MySql as I have figured out how to set it up, create my database and tables, and get data entered into it, but I have recently discovered that stored procedure support will not be available until version 5 (which is in early alpha stages of testing).  I tried this version out, but it crashes a lot.  :-\  I really don't want to be forced to use SQL statements to interact with this database...I'd much rather use stored procedures, but until version 5 it's not looking good (unless anyone knows of a different database system to use that's free, hehehe).

Something else I'm trying to get involved in is called XCom which is also being hosted on GotDotNet.com.  This is a project someone else started and I'm mearly trying to get started on.  I picked this app because it's a game under development with C# which is something I'm interested in.  I felt this would be a good way to get some exposure to that area.  Thus far I've been unable to get their source code to compile, but hopefully the main guy (I think he's handle is Bruma) has fixed this now.

For a living I write library code which is then used to automate the testing of software on various Windows OS's.  I really enjoy the fact that code I write is used to make Windows a better product.

Other various things I'm involved in is playing / writing music and playing the most evil vile of games...Everquest 2.  So that's pretty much all there is to me.  :)