Introduction

In January 2003, InfoWorld and CNET News.com reported that Borland announced that it had licensed Microsoft's .NET Framework SDK, stating that they intended to include it in "a product." Within weeks, Borland made another announcement that one of those products would be a C# Integrated Development Environment (IDE), code-named SideWinder. On June 24, 2003, Borland officially released the project that was formerly code-named SideWinder as C#Builder.

This makes Borland the first company to commercially license and release a product with Microsoft's .NET technology. The significance of this is that you, as a C# developer, have all the benefits of the .NET platform. C#Builder allows you to write the same C# code and use the same .NET Framework Base Class Libraries (BCL) as other developers using Microsoft tools. What you get is value added by Borland's C#Builder IDE, which supports all .NET technologies, including Windows Forms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Web Services, and more. Borland has also created their own ADO.NET database component called the Borland Data Provider (BDP) for Microsoft .NET. BDP is a high-performance set of components that target multiple databases, including Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Borland Interbase 7.0, IBM DB2, and Oracle9i.

C#Builder Kick Start is designed to help developers learn how to build .NET applications using Borland C#Builder. The focus of this book is to move beyond the obvious, explain why things work as they do, and add value beyond what you will find in C#Builder's technical documentation.

When I first considered writing this book, I started doing research in my own library, which contains hundreds of books that I've accumulated over the years. I couldn't recall what books I had that covered IDEs and I looked at each title. It is revealing that I never have owned a single IDE book, and I pondered the reason why. It seems that I never bought an IDE book because I never needed it. After more thought, I realized that most people are quite capable of figuring out on their own how to run a wizard, type in a program, and click the Execute button. What had motivated me to buy the books that I did in the past was the technical content that helped me learn a new language or write better software, which I believe is the same motivation for many other professional software developers. The fact is that the reason people will buy C#Builder is so that they can be productive in building .NET applications. Being productive with C#Builder is important, building .NET applications is key, and code is the reason for our profession. Therefore, I wrote this book with emphasis on code so that professional software developers could quickly learn to use C#Builder in a productive manner to build .NET applications.