Programming .NET Windows Applications

Hello World

A long-standing tradition among programmers is to begin study of any new language by writing a program that prints "Hello World" to the screen. In deference to tradition, the first windows applications you create will do just that.

In this section, you will create three progressively more interesting versions of the venerable Hello World program. These versions will demonstrate some of the fundamental features of a Windows application. The first version will be a console application that writes a line of text to the system console (also known as a Command Prompt Window. Some old-timers still call it a DOS box, which is technically no longer accurate.). The next version will be a true Windows application, even if it is somewhat limited. The final version will add a button to demonstrate event handling. (Chapter 4 will cover events in detail.)

Using a Text Editor

The tool you are most likely to use when developing Windows applications is Visual Studio .NET. You may use any editor you like, however. All source code and configuration files for all .NET applications (Windows and web) are flat ASCII text files—easily created, read, and modified using any text editor, ranging from Notepad or WordPad (included with Windows) to powerful third-party code editors and development environments.

Tip

Both Visual Studio .NET and the C# command-line compilers support different language encodings. In Visual Studio .NET, encoding is accessed under File → Advanced Save Options. The C# command-line ...