Summary

In this chapter, you were introduced to some of the tools that you will use throughout the rest of this book. You have had a quick tour around the Visual Studio .NET development environment and used it to build two types of applications. The simpler of these, the console application, is quite enough for most of your needs and allows you to focus on the basics of C# programming. Windows applications are more complicated but are visually more impressive and intuitive to use to anyone accustomed to a Windows environment (and let's face it, that's most of us).

In this chapter, you learned:

• How the Visual Studio 2005 development environment works

• How to create a simple console application

• How to get a Windows application up and running

Now that you know how you can create simple applications, you can get down to the real task of learning C#. The next section of this book will deal with basic C# syntax and program structure, before you move on to more advanced object-oriented methods. Once you've covered all that, you can start to look at how to use C# to gain access to the power available in the .NET Framework.