Anybody here program using C#? Where to start....

The Dreamer

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I used to be a programmer, back in the days of 6502 and Z80 Assembly language coding. But have never written in any high-level language (aside from a spot of BBC BASIC a long, long, time ago)!

I probably have a need to write a movie scraper to keep my ageing Mede8er players going, as the in-built scrapers no longer work properly with the various movie databases, corrupting the images. So looking to create something along the lines of YAMJ, or YADIS - but with an easy to use GUI.

Just wondering where to start?

Visual Studio seems the obvious choice, and looking at the API documentation for TVDB.com, I think the code appears to be in some sort of C - not sure yet how to 'talk' to that - but baby steps first.

Should I be looking at C#, or Visual BASIC?

If C#, where do I begin to learn this stuff? Plenty of paid for courses available - but looking for stuff I can do myself; books and the like.

So, any recommendations?

TIA
 
Unless you're learning the language for another purpose e.g. employment, I'd just use an off-the-shelf tool.
 
Unless you're learning the language for another purpose e.g. employment, I'd just use an off-the-shelf tool.

Unfortunately, there is no off the shelf tool that does what I need.

Scraping the stuff from TVDB etc. is just a part of what I need. To be able to combine poster, fanart, and XML data into a background for display on the Mede8er. Like this....

fanart.jpg


+

poster.jpg


=

preview.jpg




There were tools that did this, YAMJ, YADIS, etc. but they no longer work - or at least not reliably, likewise the Mede8er itself; TVDB is changing it's API to a 'paid for' service, and as a part of that, has changed the format of it's jpeg files, such that they no longer work on the Mede8er without 'resaving' to strip out the 'corrupted' data.

I can work around all of this manually, but it's a PITA, and a simple 'one-click' solution is what I'm interested in developing. The best combo at the moment is YADIS and YADIS2Mede8er - but YADIS will fall over properly once TVDB fully implements the paid for model (as will every current scraper at the moment).

I appreciate the effort required is going to be far more than simply binning the Mede8er and buying a Zappiti - but still atm like the idea of doing something myself - even if I fail trying!

Of course, I could be biting off more than I can chew - and if it proves to be too much effort then I see a couple of Zappiti's in my future! :D
 
Most books and shorter courses will focus on the fundamentals of programming and while I've never done assembly I'd imagine you'd be familiar with most of the concepts - loops, data types, conditionals and so on.

The official C# documentation likely has a introduction to the language covering it's specific syntax and quirks.

I'm not familiar with these sorts of programs but if this is the YAMJ you're referring to then it's open source (GPL licence) and written in a major language (Java) so you could modify the existing application to work with the new API rather than starting from scratch.
 

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