Appendix B: C for Visual Basic 6 Developers

Overview

This appendix presents a brief introduction to the C# language, specifically aimed at those developers whose experience up until now has been mostly or entirely with Visual Basic 6.

Note

Note that throughout this appendix, references to Visual Basic indicate Visual Basic 6. On those few occasions when we mention Visual Basic 2005, we will explicitly name it as such.

C# and Visual Basic are very different languages, both in their syntactical style and in the fundamental concepts that they are based on. This means that Visual Basic developers will find they have quite a steep learning curve to climb in order to become familiar with C#, even at a basic level. The aim of this appendix is to make that learning curve easier by providing a tutorial to C#. This tutorial presumes knowledge of Visual Basic, and focuses on the main conceptual differences between the two languages. The approach in this appendix will be to compare Visual Basic solutions with C# solutions programmatically.

This does mean that coverage of the C# language will be restricted to a basic level. This appendix does not cover the more advanced features of the language (which is covered in Part I of this book). The emphasis is on showing you the different methodologies involved in writing code using the C# language.