Programming C# 3.0, 5th Edition

Developing "Hello World"

There are at least two ways to enter, compile, and run the programs in this book: use the Visual Studio 2008 IDE, or use a text editor and a command-line compiler (along with some additional command-line tools to be introduced later).

Although you can develop software outside Visual Studio 2008, the IDE provides enormous advantages. These include indentation support, IntelliSense word completion, color coding, and integration with the help files. Most important, the IDE includes a powerful debugger and a wealth of other tools.

This book tacitly assumes that you'll be using Visual Studio 2008. However, the tutorials focus more on the language and the platform than on the tools. You can copy all the examples into a text editor such as Windows Notepad or Emacs, save them as text files with the extension .cs, and compile them with the C# command-line compiler that is distributed with the .NET Framework SDK (or a .NET-compatible development tool chain such as Mono or Microsoft's Shared Source CLI). Note that some examples in later chapters use Visual Studio 2008 tools for creating Windows Forms and Web Forms, but even these you can write by hand in Notepad if you are determined to do things the hard way.

Editing "Hello World"

To create the "Hello World" program in the IDE, select Visual Studio 2008 from your Start menu or a desktop icon, and then choose File → New → Project from the menu toolbar. This will invoke the New Project window. (If you are using Visual Studio ...