Scoble's learning to program in C#. Next year I'm going to be writing a book for people learning to program. Lately I've been thinking a lot that it might be based on manipulating Office from C#. The gap between "Hello, World!" and "controlling my computer to do cool things" is too large for learners -- who wants to struggle with the concept of recursion when the payoff is "So now you can calculate factorials!" Originally, I was thinking of .NET Terrarium as the context, and that does have advantages but, on the other hand, if you're manipulating Word or Excel or Outlook, you're tying the learning directly to the tools people use every day.

The challenge is making enough money during the day so that I can pull off this project and InkPositive in my spare time. I've passed up some significant opportunities to make a run at these projects (which I hope to eventually profit from), so I've got some exciting months ahead...