I am (actually was) an ardent fan of the Visual Studio programming environment, especially Visual Basic. I found that it reduced the job of creating GUIs to mere click and drag (dint realize it was making me lazy) . Initial codes for my toy-experiments were simple enough to code. I took a few days to code them when I was in high school.
I was beginning to start automating my computer ( I personally do not like doing robo-jobs). As the complexity of the code started increasing (i.e. , as I wanted to perform larger number of simpler tasks), I realized I was spending more time searching for snippets of code on the internet to perform simple tasks such as displaying the taskbar icon or saving the environment variables to a .ini file and or saving a screenshot into a file (specifically .jpg file). I needed SIMPLE/QUICK-fixes for a relatively small jobs ( all I wanted is that the snippet be reliable ).
This was when I came across this utility called AUTOIT . ( I had earlier visited the page of AutoHotkey..). The syntax of AutoIT was very very close to that of Visual Basic. So I went through the AutoIt tutorial on youtube ( it took a few hours on a weekend to complete this series 🙂 ) . I have started using AutoIT now .. And I have created some cool applications. And I dint think I will be able to ever assemble so many features into a single small yet powerful code. As a sample, my time-keeper application with automatic logging + .ini file exporter + taskbar icon + context-menus on the taskbar icon + timer + system-wide-hotkeys) application took me 130 lines 🙂 ( & yes this includes the comments too ).. Hoping to uploading the codes soon .. ( You can get my codes/project downloads at the download section of my HOMEPAGE)