Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

5.7. Summary

This chapter introduced you to the world of programming within the .NET Framework. Programming is a huge subject covered by literally thousands of books. Although programming can get really complex, the bare basics that you need to understand are relatively easy to grasp. The fun thing about programming is that you don't have to be an expert to make useful programs. You can simply start with a simple Hello World example and work from there, each time expanding your view on code a little.

To be able to write applications, each programming language defines data types. These are the building blocks of any application and are used to work with data that your application operates on. With variables you can store data with simple numeric types like System.String or System.Boolean or in other, more complex objects and collections that are defined in the .NET Framework and that you can define yourself. Arrays and collections allow you to group more than one object within a single variable, giving you easy access to them.

Besides data types, statements are another part of the grammar of a programming language. With statements you tell the program what you want it to do. The first group of statements is the operators, which enable you to work with data. For example, you can add two numeric values, concatenate two strings, or compare the result of an expression with a predefined value.

Making decisions in code is a common operation, so both VB.NET and C# offer a number of different ...