Beginning C# 3.0

4.8. Summary

In this chapter you learned what you need to do to define a variable for use in a program. While the approach taken here may seem like using an H-bomb to kill an ant, understanding what Visual Studio is doing with something as simple as a data definition will ultimately make you a better programmer. Having studied this chapter, you should now understand the following:

• Operators and operands

• Binary, unary, and ternary operators

• Expressions

• Statements

• lvalues and rvalues

• What a symbol table is and how Visual Studio uses it

• How Visual Studio interacts with Windows via messages

• The Bucket Analogy

• Several aspects of the Visual Studio debugger

• The advantages of using symbolic constants in your programs

Make sure you understand completely what lvalues and rvalues are and how they relate to data definitions. We will use those terms often in subsequent chapters.