Someone I know has recently asked me if it's possible to create a tool for them.

What they want is something which'll iterate through several thousand PowerPoint files in a directory tree, renaming them and moving them to a new tree with different subfolders depending on name, and then go through the slides themselves in order to update any OLE links which they contain.

Originally I was hoping to do this in PowerShell and making progress. The problem came when I discovered that PowerShell and Office Automation have problems if your culture isn't set to en-US. I'm not willing to change it just for this (plus I did try changing it, and still had the same problem) and so have had to move to the next step.

I've been learning PowerShell, and a bit of .NET over the last couple of weeks. Just finished installing Visual Studio and I'm going to have a look at whether I can learn to do this within Visual C#. I'm already tripping over a few conventions which are different from PowerShell (having to declare every single variable as strongly typed, and define array sizes is not my favourite thing) but I'm getting there slowly.

If anyone knows any good resources for this, they'd be appreciated. I'm getting there but anything which'd speed up the learning process would be great.

Once this one's out of the way I'll be looking for a new hobby project, and hopefully going back to PowerShell for a bit.