In 1985, I was thinking of learning C while reading a Dr. Dobb's Journal on programming and saw an advertisement for a new C compiler by Mark Williams Company. They were producing some enterprise-level software but decided to write a low-cost C compiler and market it to hobbyists, or poor college students such as myself. This particular ad promised to give away the first 75 to whomever requested it. I was happily surprised to win my first C compiler for the IBM PC adorably named, "Let's C."
A few years later, I wrote a reading comprehension program with Turbo C++. It was a graphical program that asked questions at the end of a story and graded the reader's answers. On that project, I was given the choice of language and although Turbo Pascal could've done the job quite well, I'm always interested in opportunities to grow my skill set and broaden my understanding of other tools.
I have used Visual Studio in several capacities, one of which was an application to synchronize customers, inventory, and sales between a web site and chain of sports stores. I've written DLLs and sample plugins and XML-parsing tools, and can read C# just as well as any other language. I actually really like the terse syntax of the language (and even submitted an entry to the Obfuscated C Contest many years ago). Knowing C and it's derivatives has helped ease the learning curve to other languages such as PHP and JavaScript.
