Starting Small Now

I'm in a completely different situation from those early days. I'm still married to the same lovely woman, and she still looks great. The kids have grown up and finished college, and are pretty much self sufficient. I have enough income to live on, so the sense of urgency I had back then is not there. A good thing too, as my energy level is nowhere even close to what it was 30 years ago, although I'm in robust good health.

This time I have a business plan. My application will be a "Virtual Instrument Panel" for ships, replacing a hodge-podge of mechanical instruments. It will be marketed via the internet. Users will download it and pay me with Paypal. Once I get it running, I can advertise on Google, and the cash will roll in. At least that is the plan...

So, after 15 years of not programming, what language and tools would I use? When I stopped writing software (because I sold the company) I was using Visual Basic 4, which I believe cost$99. It turns out that VB is still around and the latest version, VB.NET 2008 is free, at least for the most "basic" version.

Naturally I downloaded and tried to install it right away.

Problem one: It insisted that I already had a "beta" version installed, and it would not let me install until I uninstalled the beta. Maybe I did download and install a beta version of VB.NET, but I didn't remember doing it and it wasn't listed in the control panel installed list. After 3 days of messing around I finally succeeded in purging the registry of all VB references and the language installed.

Unfortunately when I fired it up, It looked kind of strange. Since I last used it, VB has become a true object oriented language, like C#. I was aware of the concept but had no experience. Surprisingly that wasn't a big problem, and within a few hours I had written a couple of utility program. Nothing commercial, just stuff I could use myself to help me find my way around the IDE.

I love VB.NET! It turned out I can whip out an app in no time, and publish it with a setup program, at a single mouse click. You can publish to a web site, or to a file system for use with a CD or DVD. I decided on the latter as my app will not need the internet.