C# Lab #1

Started the first lab of the Head First C# book. I skimmed the first few chapters, just looking for tips and tricks on the Visual Studio IDE and anything that might have stood out in the C# language.

Completing the lab was a bit of a challenge, as it made some assumptions... like that you read the previous chapters very thoroughly and caught some of the quickly covered topics. I, of course, skimmed everything, so missed a couple of key points. I suppose if I went through the actual exercises, I wouldn't have missed those points.

Overall, the lab was pretty straight forward. I'm already a coder and a wee bit familiar with C# from things I've done at work, so I pumped through it in a few hours. It took that long mostly because I'm a stickler for details, and the project plan wasn't exactly detail rich (which is fine, since they want you, the dear reader, to use your own mind on figuring out the specific implementation. I just come from a very rigid design document background).

C#: the beginning

To start the blog off, I'm going to follow my attempt to use my newly purchased "Head First C#" book to teach myself C#. I already used the Java version of the series to brush up on my Java skills (which often fade to the wayside because I'm a C/C++ programmer as a general rule). I thought the Java book was fantastic. The C# book is much thicker and proves to be very challenging. I've done some programming in C# before (created a GUI for a build system; accessed a small DB to get the data), but it's been a while and I'm hoping that this effort will re-engage me with the language starting at a more fundamental level (how do I set it up from scratch for example?) and then see what the "basic advanced" features of the language offers. Wish me luck. I hope to get it done before the end of summer.