A Programmers Introduction to C#, by Eric Gunnerson

Just read this. Seemed like a good book to me though I can’t really tell until I put it into practice. I’m sure a couple of days with C# would give me a solid understanding of the language. It’s very similiar to C++, which I’ve used for years, so it’s not a large leap.

You Mac folks will probably groan with disgust, but I’m teaching myself about .Net (pronounced dot net). This is the latest and greatest technology from Microsoft for writing web based software (among other things). I’m interested in learning about the technologies. Call it a healthy curiosity. Not sure how I’ll fit this project into my life, given my lack of spare time, but I’ll weasel a few minutes here and there. I admit it, I have too many projects going simultaneously… I get interested in something and off I go… (oooh, shiney!) Pending projects: cd reorg, garage reorg, various house projects, books, etc. blah blah blah. Not enough frickin’ time in the day!!

Anyway, I want to learn how to write web applications. The first step was to read about the preferred language (c#). I’m still quite fuzzy on how everything fits together though. I have a large learning curve, especially since I’ve never really used Visual Studio or written any software for Windows. Sheesh, how hard could it be?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I finally got visual studio to run without complaining about .Net not being found. I had to run some command line installer thingy and now it’s working. The cool thing was the help link in the error dialog led me right to the solution. Nice. That impressed me a lot.

Eventually I was able to write a “hello world” forms app and run and debug it in VS.Net. Nice. Easy to understand. But then I downloaded and started poking around in the source for DasBlog. What the? There’s a lot o’ crap in there. Actually, it makes some sense though I haven’t quite figured out how things are related to each other.

That’s where I’m at with this. I’m reading a book about writing web apps with .Net which should clear some of the fog. I don’t have that book in front of me or I’d put a link to some info about it here. Stay tuned for that.

I better go now though, we’re having Fred Steak and corn on the cob for dinner which is obviously is a high priority interrupt. C-Ya

P.S. Trina, I did a search for Fred Steak on the web and one of your blog entries came up. What are the odds?