Visual C# 2008 Express

Having tried a bit of VB.NET, I have decided to have a go at learning some C#. To that end, I am using Visual C# 2008 Express from Microsoft. Not least because it is free!

The experience I gained with visual Basic has helped a lot with the initial learning curve of C#, as a lot of the statements are very similar. Some only require the addition of a semi-colon to convert it for example.

The C# language itself is very clean, compared to relative verbosity of Visual Basic, and I am picking it up well (at a beginner level at least.)

Biggest hurdle so far has been understanding Delegates and creating events. the methodology for this is far different than Visual Basic, in part because VB hides away most of the machinery for this, and so are not exposed to it as readily. C# however, requires you to do this stuff explicitly, which is hard at first.



As for the Express application, I am extremely impressed. It has all the functionality I could wish for as a single user at the beginner level. There is only one caveat to that, and that is the lack of a Setup and Install project template. Only ClickOnce technology is implemented, and to be honest, I find that inappropriate for my needs. I will investigate creating an installer for any apps using third party tools, such as Inno for example. I'm sure that will the subject of a future blog entry when the time comes.