My latest little heart-throb has been the reason behind more than a couple sleepless nights as of late. It’s called Visual C#.

We met under the shade of iTunes’ beautiful SDK and it was love at first sight. It’s the comfort of an old friend, C++, combined with everything I love about scripting languages, and it’s really easy to make solid GUIs (graphical user interface) with it. Not that there aren’t problems in our relationship - it runs almost painfully slow, but what it lacks in speed it makes up in flexibility.

As I mentioned before, the only reason I’ve been messing around with it is because of iTunes’ API (application public interface for those playing at home; an API allows you to write your own program that interacts with the functions of another program in a publicly described fashion; for instance, Amazon.com publishes an API that allows other websites to grab information from their website using tools that Amazon.com has written). iTunes has this habit of keeping tabs on how many times you play any given song, and when you last played it, but if you play it on your iPod, it doesn’t keep track of that. Your iPod grabs the play counts from iTunes, but when you synchronize your iPod with your iTunes library, the times you’ve played your songs on your iPod seem to disappear. One way to solve this problem is to write a script using the API published by Apple.

There are a couple of other little tricks I’d like to teach iTunes, and so I’ve been putting together this little bundle of random tools with C#. It’s a lot of fun, and I figure it’s better than me playing Mario Cart.