News

Every once in a while, I get asked if I have any suggestions as to how to get started with .NET/C# development. Generally, the person asking has a good background in programming and design. In order to really use a language and library, though, you want to know which concepts and patterns are used in a language as well as what those patterns are called, how to use them and so on. If you don’t know what’s already available, you end up reinventing the wheel or doing things in an inefficient way.

Generally, you can find information about many of these topics at Microsoft’s MSDN documentation or you can search for articles on working with them. Just remember to always look for existing functionality in the .NET framework or the Quino framework—only if you have the pleasure of working with it, naturally—or by searching for solutions online. A good place to look for such solutions is Stack Overflow.

Without further ado, here’s a list of topics and links that I think would be helpful in getting started with .NET / C# 4.0.[1][2]

• Basic

  • string (C# Reference)
  • DateTime (a useful adjunct is Calculating Date Difference in C#)
  • Properties
  • Collection Classes (Microsoft)
  • Using Attributes (CSharp Station)
  • Named and Optional Parameters
  • Does Your Code Pass The Turkey Test? (Moserware) (Localization)
  Advanced

  • Type Conversions in C#
  • What’s the Opposite of “nullable”?
  • The power of yield (return)
  • Lambdas and Closures and Currying. Oh my! (Part 1) (CodeThinked) (the first in a 9-part series of articles)
  • Threading in C# (this is actually chapter 22 of C# 4.0 in a Nutshell)
  • Reflection (accessing language metadata at runtime)
  • Memory / Unmanaged / Binary

    • Reading binary data in C# by Jon Skeet[3]
    • Reading Unmanaged Data Into Structures
    • Memory Model, Memory Barrier and Singleton Pattern in .NET
    • Weak Events in C# (This article deals with the “Weak References Problem” common to all garbage-collected environments.)
    • IDisposable: What Your Mother Never Told You About Resource Deallocation
    Linq/Rx

    • 101 Linq Examples
    • Who Ever Said LINQ Predicates Need To Be Boolean-Valued?
    • Introducing Rx (Linq to Events)
    • Duality of IEnumerable/IObservable
    Generics

    • An Introduction to C# Generics
    • LINQ Farm: Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0
    • Immutable Collections
    • Wildcard Generics
    • Generics and Delegates in C#
    • Waiting for C# 4.0: A casting problem in C# 3.5
    Code Contracts / Design by Contract

    • An analysis of C# language design
    • Microsoft Code Contracts: Not with a Ten-foot Pole
    API design

    • Designing a small API: Bit manipulation in C#
    • Building pseudo-DSLs with C# 3.5
    • Creating fluent interfaces with inheritance in C#
  User Interfaces

  • Winforms
  • Free ASP.NET MVC “NerdDinner” Tutorial (ASP.NET MVC is a web site building technology)
  • Developer Express Winforms Common Concepts (The link is to the Winforms site, but DevExpress also has support for ASP.NET MVC.)
  Resources

  • Fabulous Adventures In Coding by Eric Lippert (one of the authors & maintainers of the C# compiler and an all-around clever guy when it comes to algorithms and programming)
  • Jon Skeet’s C# and .NET articles and links
  • Encodo C# Handbook
  • As mentioned above, if you have the pleasure of working with the Quino framework—there’s the official Quino documentation (password-protected for now).