Coding4Fun

Before We Get Started

This chapter assumes that you're a .NET (Visual Basic or C#) developer who plays World of Warcraft, and maybe you've used Warcraft addons, but you've never written your own. There are many similar concepts that apply to both building Warcraft addons and building .NET applications, as you can see in Table 3-1.

Table 3-1. High-level comparison of Warcraft and .NET programming models

CATEGORY	WARCRAFT ADDONS	.NET
Application files and resources	Table of Contents (.toc)	Assembly manifest file
Application metadata (name, author, version)	Table of Contents	AssemblyInfo
UI	FrameXML markup and widgets	XAML markup and controls
Code	Lua	VB/C#
Programming model	Event-based	Event-based
Libraries	WoW Function APIs, third-party libraries	.NET Framework, third-party libraries
Storage	SavedVariables	Isolated storage/filesystem
Referencing current object	Self	Me (VB); this (C#)
Tools	AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft	Visual Studio Express Editions

A Quick Tour of the Lua Programming Language

There are many nuances to the Lua programming language, but the following is a quick glance at its features. For a full reference on the Lua programming language, you can download the language reference from http://www.lua.org/manual/.

Note

World of Warcraft uses a slightly modified version of the Lua 5.1 runtime that adds some helper functions and removes operating system and file I/O functions.

Lua types

Lua defines five basic types: a Boolean (true/false), a number, ...