Code

By John in Code, Computing, Tech ⋅ December 21, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

You've read Daniel's article on becoming a coder, you've had a look at PHP/Python, and maybe even written some programs. Now you've decided to move on and create some nifty code that uses a GUI, with menus, buttons, and all the other things that users expect. Using Python or PHP this can be done, but with rather a lot of difficulty. (See here for creating GUIs in Python, and here for PHP)

In my opinion, a much better solution, especially for Windows developers, is to use Microsoft's C# (pronounced as C-Sharp) language. You can download Visual Studio Express 2008 C# edition here for free, a complete C# Integrated Development Environment, with an easy-to-use form editor and a nice code editor. Also in the install program is the option to install SQL Server Express, a database server that works well with C#. SQL Server is a nice addition to have, if you decide to do some programs with databases, but be wary that it is an additional ~30mb to download.

Once you have installed and started Visual Studio, open the example programs it came with, and familiarise yourself with the development environment. Each of the projects has a help file, with some tasks to do. Read these, run the programs, and try making some modifications. I find the language of C# to be fairly simple, but if you come from a Python background then the code may well look horrible. Unlike in Python, white space does absolutely nothing. You could write your whole program on one line, if you were that way inclined. Each line of code must end with a semi-colon. Also, make sure you understand how “for” statements work in C#. Unlike in Python, where you would write something like “for i in array”, C#'s for statement operates as follows: for (statement1, condition, statement2)
e.g.

for (int i =0; i<5; i++)
{
DoStuff(somearray[i]);
}

If you want to use a more Python-like loop, then you can do this:

foreach (string s in somestrings)
{
DoStuff(s);
}

The most important thing to remember is that in C#, every variable must be defined with a type, and that type cannot change.

Hopefully, from what you already know of programming and with the information you can find on the internet (such as on the MSDN Library, you should be able to quickly pick up the C# language and create wonderful programs.

If you have any questions, e-mail me, but bear in mind that I have never used Visual Studio 2008 (I have 2005, and 2008 has only just been released), or C# 3.0, so if your query is on anything to do with the new features please don't send it. Google, and the MSDN forums are your friends there.

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