Hi Don: This is going to be a raw beginners tutorial project. Getting into remote anything is light years beyond the scope of this project. When done with this project What you want to do might be fun but it sounds like it would require some external devices which I might not have access to. Heck, I have never even done anything with a mobile application. For me that sounds like fun but later. Rick USA ----- Original Message ----- From: Donald Marang To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 4:17 PM Subject: Re: Vb.net or C#.net Tutorial Project How about the application I have been failing to find time for? I plan to create a simple, accessible PC application to act as a media DLNA Remote Control. DLNA stands for Digital Living Network Alliance. It is a little heard about standard that is in probably every networked device in your home! In my home, I currently have the following devices that seem to work with DLNA; All 3 Windows 7 computers, DirecTV R22 DVR, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, and I believe even my Epson network printer may be able to be told to print photos through DLNA. I have not checked this out yet, but most smart mobile devices such as Android phones, IPhones and the iPad should be able to perform most of these functions, especially the Controller functions. What a cool remote that would make! There are several flavors of DLNA devices, including a Server to Host media, Renderer to display / play the media and a third class, a Controller to direct traffic. There are also similar mobile device classes. I am interested in the last class, since every controller is not accessible. Most of the time it is just bundled in the same software as the rendering engine and displayed on the TV screen. I also have reasonably priced software that runs in the background of one of the computers in your house. It acts as a DLNA Server device on your network and also transcodes a variety of formats so that is rarely thought about. This functionality is primarily identical to what Windows Media Player 12, with Windows 7, provides. The cool part is it reaches out across the Internet to grab and serve up music and video from countless and growing sources! For instance, if you select the PlayOn DLNA server, the first or root level folder view will show all of it's current services. Some of these include Hulu, YouTube, NetFlix (my favorite), Comedy Central, CBS, Revision 3live streaming video and video podcasts. I have not been able to do exahstive searches, but they are talking about adding a variety of music sources as well. The software needs to search the local network for server devices, and display them in a list box or combo box. Once the server is chosen, then the desired media is chosen in some sort of file / folder structure. At last, another list view or combo box is needed to select where you want the selected media played and a PlayNow button. There are a variety of DLNA Open Source libraries that should handle the complex network tasks. I have not had much time to check them out yet. They are available for several languages. I was looking at Coherence Python library. I was going to create the sinple interface in Python as well. I do not know if the class libraries are as well behaved as .Net to allow mix and matching. I am not sure such a large unknown is appropriate for a learninhg / teaching application. But it is interesting! Here is a link for some Open Source DLNA libraries: http://elinux.org/DLNA_Open_Source_Projects This will be ideal to control available whole house audio systems, wireless speakers, home theater systems, send video to your X-Box / Playstation 3 and more. My immediate plans are to make my DirecTV DVR useful by playing Netflix movies for the whole family and to finally find something interesting to play in the background, since my TV is on 24 hours a day. By the way, for this and future projects, I want to learn both C Sharp and Python better. Don Marang From: RicksPlace Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 11:12 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Vb.net or C#.net Tutorial Project Sure, anything we can think of is doable. Do you have any data storage system like Sql Server Express or the Sql Compact Edition on your machine? If you installed the full Visual Studio you might have both available. If you installed an Express Edition you might have neither and that will be something to also look into. If there are several folks I would like to get everyone on the same page, or as close to it as possible with all our diferent machines, software and all that jazz before we start building a project. Also, do you have a project in mind or are you working on something? It is better to build something folks are actually interested in rather than just something to demonstrate technicals., you learn better and faster when things are relevant to you and you have an idea of where the project is going and what you want it to do. Rick USA ----- Original Message ----- From: Bryan Schulz To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 10:57 AM Subject: Re: Vb.net or C#.net Tutorial Project hi, i would prefer vb.net. could we include a tree list? i have part of this created and the main nodes are the letters of the alphabet in segments of three, then singles, then names starting with that letter. so the top node may be ABC, and expands to show A, B, C, vertically, then if you expand A, it shows your friends names like Alan Jackson, Andy Smith, etc. and selecting one refreshes a pane with their name, address, phone numbers, email, etc. I meant to continue this program but it got put on the shelf. Bryan Schulz ----- Original Message ----- From: RicksPlace To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 9:03 AM Subject: Vb.net or C#.net Tutorial Project Hi: There have been a few folks who want to get started programming in either Vb.net or C#.net. If there is some interest in learning to work in one of these languages I will walk through designing a simple project and then work with any interested folks on building the project in either Vb.net, C#.net or both. If we do it on list the project will be in the archives and, or, anyone with an interest in the step by step tutorial can upload them to some online repository. If you are interested in this idea let me know and, if we get a couple of folks to walk through the lessons, I will start from scratch perhaps this weekend or Monday. I will have to download and install C# Express 2008 if you want to stick with that language but it can be done. If you have an idea for a project let me know. Otherwise I will just pick one like the PhoneBook Project I mentioned to get started. I will also post some links to articles, or post some of my own, related to the technicals we will be using so we can discuss them openly and answer questions. The idea will be to teach how to research technicals online, how to use the VS IDE with a screen reader and how to do a little vb or C# programming to process things like clicking a button or accessing a Data Storage File of some sort. Let me know what you think about this idea. Rick USA