Hello,

I am sending this to let people know that I intend to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2006 for ReactOS, and to see if anybody has any suggestions for a beginner programmer like me.

Allow me to introduce myself for those of you who do not know me as mikedep333 already. My name is Michael DePaulo, I am just finishing my 1^st year at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (US). I know English and some Spanish. I consider this project to be a great idea and I hope to see it do a lot better. So far I have been trying to help it out by answering visitor questions on #reactos, entering info into the wiki, and whatnot, but I intend to actually start coding for this project with such a worthy vision.

Unfortunately I only have taken one introductory programming course, and it was only in Java, although I have a relatively good understanding of the components of Windows and how they work together. I also am pretty familiar with GNU/linux and mingw. Therefore I need to determine what I would be capable of doing with my limited experience and selecting the best part of ROS to work on in time for the SoC application deadline (May 8^th.) I was thinking of working on an application bundled with ROS (which should work with wine too) such as wordpad or imagesoft, (which is like MS paint), both of which are being done by Ged Murphy at the moment. My friend suggested writing a driver like for NICs since we already have the pcnet and ne2000 ones to act as templates and I’d just be working with an interface, but I was under the impression that writing drivers in general requires a lot of experience and you risk crashing the kernel a lot.

Even if I cannot complete a SoC project, I still intend to help code for this project this summer. I will continue to help develop it onwards too.

If anyone has any advice or anything else to tell me, feel free to share it. I can be found in #reactos usually and will be checking ros-general pretty closely.

Also, I know that everyone around here uses the quotation style of using only a portion of text above what you’re about to say with the > next to it. Until evolution or mozilla lightning works with my new palm, I will be using Outlook 2003 primarily. Is there a way to easily quote using that method in outlook?

Best Regards,

Mike DePaulo