Beginner programming projects?

[+unabatedshagie Subscriber¹]

I'm currently about 9 weeks into a C# dotnet programming course.

I'm looking for some decent beginner style projects that I'd be able to attempt as I'm finding just reading and doing the lab work isn't letting everything sink in.

[garethevans1986]

I wrote a game where you entered the users, choose a icon per user and then played tic-tac-toe....the winner was the first person with 3 in a row.

GE

[pes2013]

A calculator is something almost everyone has done one in their life.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Stuff I did when I started:

A hangman using the console.

A tic-tac-toe using Winforms or WPF.

A Tetris using XNA.

All these projects can be done in very few lines of code if you do them well, and don't require many external assets or artwork. They'll all test your knowledge of loops, conditionals, collections and basic data types which is what you should be focusing on at this point. Plus, they're actually fun to play once you've completed them.

[ILikeTobacco]

Make a calculator, but don't use multiply or divide. Only use add and subtract, even for the multiply and divide functions.

[Mulrian]

Make a calculator, but don't use multiply or divide. Only use add and subtract, even for the multiply and divide functions.

Whats the point?

[Crisp]

Buy a Pi.

[ILikeTobacco]

Whats the point?

Teaches you how a computer does math. Makes you think about how to do things like exponents, square roots, and all the other functions of an advanced calculator. It is one of the basic assignments you see in most college programming courses. Do you know an efficient way to find the square root of a large number using only addition and subtraction? It is a fun and challenging project for a beginner.

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

Take note of what you do on your PC in real life, and fill any voids whenever you think "damn, I wish there was a program to do it for me". My first project was a settings editor for Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. I loved the game, but changing settings could be a pain because you joined a multiplayer game from outside the game, and then went straight into the first round without being able to change settings until the game began. So I wrote a little application that read some registry settings, and allowed you to change values as desired before launching the game. Later versions allowed me to have profiles, where I could change the settings based on the map I was going to play.

Same thing for the XFire gaming messenger, except my application was able to change settings unavailable through the settings dialog. That one never really saw the light of day, but you get the idea.

If you're looking for something to task the theory (I assume) you've been taught in class, something like a Tetris clone or Pong would be fairly do-able for a beginner. It'd help you apply your skills to basic drawing, loops, classes, that kind of thing.

Just don't go too big. No Anti-virus, no web browsers, anything like that. You'll bite off more than you can chew and get bored, guaranteed.