Learning C# 3.0

Your First Program: Hello World

At the most fundamental level, a C# application consists of source code. Source code is human-readable text written in a text editor. A text editor is like a word processor, but it puts no special characters into the file to support formatting, only the text. You could use any old text editor to write your code, but since you’ll be using Visual Studio throughout this book, that’s the best choice. Start up C# Express or Visual Studio. The first thing you’ll see is the Start Page, which will look similar to Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2. The Start Page for Visual C# 2008 Express. It looks pretty empty now, but that won’t last long. You’ll be using the Create link on the lefthand side.

There’s a lot of news in the middle, which you don’t need to pay attention to right now. We’ll give you a full tour of the Visual Studio interface in Chapter 2, but for now you need the Recent Projects box on the left. If you just installed Visual Studio, that box is empty at the moment, because you haven’t created any projects yet. That’s about to change. Click Project, next to the Create link. The New Project dialog box opens, as you can see in Figure 1-3.

There are lots of options here that we’ll discuss later, but for now we just want to get you started. Select Console Application from the row of templates at the top. When you do that, the content of the Name field at the bottom ...