Beginning Visual C# 2010

Chapter 2. Writing a C# Program

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• A basic working knowledge of Visual Studio 2010 and Visual C# 2010 Express Edition

• How to write a simple console application

• How to write a Windows Forms application

Now that you've spent some time learning what C# is and how it fits into the .NET Framework, it's time to get your hands dirty and write some code. You use Visual Studio 2010 (VS) and Visual C# 2010 Express (VCE) throughout this book, so the first thing to do is have a look at some of the basics of these development environments.

VS is an enormous and complicated product, and it can be daunting to first-time users, but using it to create basic applications can be surprisingly simple. As you start to use VS in this chapter, you will see that you don't need to know a huge amount about it to begin playing with C# code. Later in the book you'll see some of the more complicated operations that VS can perform, but for now a basic working knowledge is all that is required.

VCE is far simpler for getting started, and in the early stages of this book all the examples are described in the context of this IDE. However, if you prefer, you can use VS instead, and everything will work in more or less the same way. For that reason, you'll see both IDEs in this chapter, starting with VS.

After you've had a look at the IDEs, you put together two simple applications. You don't need to worry too much about the code in these for now; you just prove that things work. By working ...