Sometime in 2012 I went with my dad to visit a friend of his who was studying at a nearby college. This friend happened to be discarding a spiral-bound photocopied textbook from a previously completed course, which ended up in my possession instead. That textbook was about the C# language and Microsoft GDK, and was my first exposure to programming.

My current understanding is that C# is either used for game development with Unity, or for web backends with ASP.NET, and not much else. The textbook covered neither of these use-cases and instead was a general introduction to object-oriented programming. I recovered some of my old C# projects off an old hard drive lately, and… they’re pretty bad, lmao. To be fair, I was 12/13 when I wrote them.

PolygonCalc

PolygonCalc displays basic properties of regular polygons with a given number of sides. It also computes the area, perimeter, and side length given a radius. Using floating-point math, of course. It’s not very useful.

The source code for PolygonCalc is archived on Codeberg.

nEWLINE

Soon after my introduction to programming, I decided that I would like to make an operating system. However, my internet access was very limited and the only programming book I had reliable access to was that C# textbook, so naturally I decided I would write my operating system in C#. As you do.

The closest thing I can describe nEWLINE as is a rudimentary REPL cosplaying as a shell in a single-user OS. It doesn’t really satisfy any of those descriptions in any meaningful way. Here’s what you can do in nEWLINE:

• commands: Displays all commands
• clear: Clears the terminal
• logout: Logs out the current user and shows login prompt
• shutdown: Saves the virtual filesystem to nEWLINE.dat and terminates the program
• adduser: Creates a user, optionally with a password and a permissions level
• deleteuser: Deletes a user
• password: Changes a users’s password
• listusers: Lists all users and their permission levels
• permissions: Changes a user’s permission level
• newfile: Creates a file with text contents
• searchfiles: Lists all files by name, optionally filtering by a search query
• displayfile: Displays the contents of a file

Things to note:

• All administrative tasks such as modifying users requires a permission level of 2 or greater
• Permission levels have no actual description and are just an integer lol. They were likely intended to be equivalent to x86 protection rings, except backwards
• The filesystem is entirely flat, there is no way to create directories. You can create a file with slashes in the name and use that as a search query to searchfiles, but that’s not the same thing
• Files cannot be modified once created, and files also cannot be overwritten
• The state of the virtual machine, including users, passwords, and files is saved to nEWLINE.dat. This data is delimited with printable unicode characters, so including any of those characters in a username, password, file name, or file contents will corrupt the entire system lmao
• If nEWLINE.dat exists but has no contents, the program crashes on startup
• Light mode is forced for some unfathomable reason

I actually lost the original source code for nEWLINE, but I did recover one if its compiled binaries. C# is extremely easy to decompile (as it “compiles” to a relatively high-level IR), so the only thing that was lost was the comments. The decompiled source code for nEWLINE is archived on Codeberg.

WordGenerator

WordGenerator builds “words” randomly using a small set of rules:

• The first letter is unlikely to be 'x', 'j', 'q', 'i', or 'o'
• No more than two vowels can occur consecutively
• Any letters other than 'o', 'a', and 'e' cannot occur twice consecutively
• The letters 'x', 'v', 'z', 'j', and 'q' are unlikely to occur in general
• There is a small chance for a second word to be appended, separated by a hyphen

The words are mostly nonsense but might be useful as names for a Bionicle fanfiction or something. Occasionally it generates an actual word too.

The source code for WordGenerator is archived on Codeberg.

Charp

This one is too broken to bother uploading the source code, but it was an attempt to make a code editor specifically tailored to C#—I guess even in 2013 Visual Studio was unbearably slow.

There is simple regex-based syntax highlighting. The window does not respond to being resized. Most of the buttons do nothing. There’s an empty rectangle that obscures part of the editor window, which I assume was an attempt at implementing autocomplete a lá IntelliSense. It does exactly one impressive thing: it’s slower than Visual Studio. Somehow. (Probably the regex.)

A

This one is too incomplete to bother uploading the source code, but it appears to be an attempt at a compiler. It consists of a regex-based scanner, and a completely empty parser source file. Like hundreds of smug morons before me, I named the language “A”. It looks like it was supposed to transpile to C#, but it doesn’t work since there’s no parser, lol. Here are the differences from C#:

• Single-line comments begin with a backtick (`)
• Multi-line comments are enclosed in a pair of tildes (~)
• global is an alias for static
• type val is an alias for struct
• type ref is an alias for class
• out, outl, inc, inl, and prompt builtins for console I/O

Here’s the file I was apparently using to test this “compiler”:

global void Main(str[] Args)`This is the main entry point for the program
{
	outl "Hey dad!";`I was showing dad this when I made this.
~Hey ma, a real
 multiline 
comment
!
~


}

That’s it! It’s somehow even worse than C#! Bravo!

Conclusion

C# bad lol

Jokes aside, I’m very thankful I got that hand-me-down textbook. C# is not my language of choice today, but it got me interested in programming. Never stop learning!