One of the things I am playing with in my spare time is converting some of the sample code for Project Hoshimi into J#. There are some high school teachers I know who would like to use it with their Java students. The first thing one learns when taking on a task like this is that a lot of things that are easy in C# and Visual Basic take more work (and more typing) in Java. Of course I was not a Java fan before either so I am perhaps biased.

The other thing one learns is that error messages are not always helpful enough. The help file can be little better. But in Visual Studio 2005 you have the option to rate and comment on help messages. Let me tell you I enjoyed doing that. I'm going to have to remember to rate some of the really good help information highly because I am rating the less useful (dare I say useless) help messages very low.

I think that rating the help file and being able to explain why it was not helpful is a great thing though. I am told by people working on help that they do plan to make improvements and send out updates based on user feedback. That is going to mean that over time the help just gets better and better. A step in the right direction I think.

BTW I'm not quite done. I can't seem to get the build method to work. The system claims that an expression, rather than an objec type, is needed as a parameter. What's up with that?