shells and windows based applications

Hi, I've a few questions regarding something I want to do.

I have a big database of all my hobbies- books, games and music, which include audio, video, jpeg, power tab and txt files...

I'd like to make a sort of "data base viewing program" sort of a combination between a web page, and media player's media librery for easy and quick access to everything.

What I would like to know is
1.what would be the ideal language/application/tool to use.
2.what are shells and would it be better to make a shell for windows or an application for windows?

 

Blah. OK.

Firstly, a shell is traditionally a piece of code which has a basic (usually text-driven) interface with the actual code of the system.

When talking about "windows" based systems, or rather Microsoft based systems, one normally talks about "DOS Shells", which is a very old CLI (command line interface) developed to allow users to interact with the DOS operating system, developed 20 something years ago. The use and ease of interface with CLIs mean that MS to this very day haven't totally discarded it (it can be brought up by typing "cmd" from "run" in the start menu).
There are many many more shells of course. Unix (and all its derivatives) have one.

But they are nothing more than a way to type commands (or catch keypresses, in the case of a graphically interface) to tell the system what to do. Oh, and of course its a way for the system to display back to you what is actually going on, with regards to what it thinks you need to know.

OK. A database content manager. I would recommend actually making a web-page. If you want to view it on your machine, get IIS installed (comes bundled with Windows), and that will allow you to view web-pages with back-end code on your machine (without being connected to the internet, and more importantly, without having the files hosted on another machine over the internet).

A database content manager is a fairly ambitious start to coding if you have little or no experience. But, its a good way to learn some basics of coding. Firstly, you will need a Database that interfaces with a web-page easily. Im guessing your database is an "Access" one (from the MS Office suite). This can interface with web-pages, but its not recommended. I would suggest downloading and installing MySQL (which is free, and well documented). Then convert your Access Database into a MySQL one. This will require a little code to do in itself. For a language, I would recommend something like PHP. This is also a free language, and very well documented. You can also download and install this on your machine, to enable database (and other things as well) interfacing from a web-page. There are also thousands of good tutorials teaching you the language, and plenty of people here and elsewhere will be able to offer you help if you get stuck.

I would actually advise against making a Windows application. This requires ALOT more work, possibly expensive tools (although free ones are available, but then support will be reduced). Let us know if you want any more help, or if you get stuck-in, if you need any help with problems, also - let us know,