First things first: setting up the tools

Before anything actually begins, I guess it should be known that I'm a pretty big fan of open source. About as big as your average geek.

But, maybe contradictory to that, I'm a huge fan of C#. Putting those together, I'm an enormous fan of mono.

So, to get started with the project (openomy - which you'll hear more about as time progresses), I got all the open source tools I needed to run. I'm using a server I've had for a little over a year now, so a lot of it had been set up already. But, because the MySQL connectors for .NET apparently only run using TCP/IP (rather than also through file sockets) I had to set up MySQL to run with TCP/IP. Which doesn't sound difficult (and isn't), but when you've never done it before, there's a bunch of quirks. Apparently my /etc/hosts file thought it'd be nice to make 127.0.0.1 be localhost.localdomain, while my users on MySQL only recognized localhost. That took a couple hours just to understand what was going on.

Now I officially have mono working with MySQL which will allow me to get working on the project at hand.

Everything is set up, at least for the initial, alpha stage, release that will be coming (hopefully) fairly shortly.