Learning C# 3.0

Chapter 1. C# and .NET Programming

Welcome to Learning C# 3.0. We’re here to teach you the C# language from the ground up. If you’ve never done any programming before, in any language, start here in Chapter 1, and we’ll have you writing real working applications in no time flat—before you reach the end of this chapter. If you have a little programming background in VB 6, PHP 4, or another non-object-oriented language, you’ll find a lot in this book that’s familiar, but also a lot that’s new. You’ll probably find the code in the first few chapters to be recognizable, but you may want to read the chapters anyway to get the hang of the syntax. Classes and objects are at the core of how C# works, though, so we’ll get to those quickly, once we’ve covered the basics.

Tip

If you’re a programmer migrating from Java or C++, you may find the material in Programming C# 3.0 by Jesse Liberty and Donald Xie (O’Reilly) a more appropriate fit for your skills.

To start at the very beginning, C# is a modern language created by Microsoft as part of its .NET platform of languages. .NET is a layer of software that makes it easier for you to write programs that can communicate with the operating system (in this case, Windows). As the name implies, C# has its roots in C++, but over three versions, it has evolved its own techniques and elements that make it distinct. Most important, C# has the backing of the .NET Framework behind it, which we’ll get into shortly. We’re not going to assume that you have any ...