I’ve finally done it! A way to create my blog and have everything set up so that I can start sharing what I am doing! After this post, all following postings will be about ISW-Prism. Before getting into that, I will give a brief background and purpose here.

I have received training in computer programming from a college in Ohio, USA. Initially I desired to understand Artificial Intelligence, how to use it and how to develop it. I assumed that Video Game Development would be the place to learn. The college of choice was affordable and accessible. I have learned that Video Game AI is not the AI I was seeking, but the programming was enjoyable. I did pick up a second degree while I was there, for Mobile Application Development. My idea was that while I was working on the games, I could develop a few apps for the mobile market and make a little money there.

To be honest, all of this was not to come. I did complete the degrees, attempted a bit of Video Game Development, but fell short of fulfilling anything worth mentioning. I ended up working for a small shoe store as their go-to guy for uploading the product to their ecommerce site. I have learned a lot while working there. I have also found that there were many aspects of my job that can be done much easier with scripting and a program to package this scripting. I wanted to use my programming skills, so I decided to create a few small C++ programs as an overkill on scripting. I enjoyed C++, so that was my first go-to language. This was successful!

Now that business is slow, I want to start packaging the scripts into a program. I have decided to switch to C# for windows forms. Well, windows forms are not the way to go. I went to WPF, company computers were still running Windows 7, so a universal app was not in. As I started coding the small scripts in C#, I have realized that the managed code is a bit different in approach. I had very little training in C#, but Java was a managed language, and I did quite well there. So, I researched a bit on C#, code techniques, and so forth. I stumbled upon MVVM, which is big within the WPF crowd.

I found that most of the tutorials I looked at were a bit old. I also found that Prism was the next step in MVVM design patterns. I delved into that! Wow, I got a bit over my head. Now I am here. I wanted to host the WPF version of the program on GitHub because of the strong open source community on GitHub, as well as some of the features I have come to like (Pages, Wiki, etc.). So, I am making my Pages site locally (I even installed all the software needed to host the site locally to test before uploading). Overnight I have learned a bit of how to customize the theme, get the site working, and to start this blog. This project will be completed, and it will stay available for all in the future. Happy times ahead!!!