Chapter 1: Application Development

Overview

This chapter covers some of the fundamental activities you will need to perform during the development of your C# solutions. The recipes in this chapter describe how to

• Build Console and Windows Forms applications (recipes 1.1 and 1.2).

• Create and use code modules and libraries (recipes 1.3 and 1.4).

• Access command-line arguments from within your applications (recipe 1.5).

• Use compiler directives and attributes to selectively include code at build time (recipe 1.6).

• Access program elements built in other languages whose names conflict with C# keywords (recipe 1.7).

• Give assemblies strong names and verify strong-named assemblies (recipes 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, and 1.11).

• Sign an assembly with a Microsoft Authenticode digital signature (recipes 1.12 and 1.13).

• Manage the shared assemblies that are stored in the global assembly cache (recipe 1.14).

• Prevent people from decompiling your assembly (recipe 1.15).

  Note  

  All of the tools discussed in this chapter ship with the Microsoft .NET Framework or the .NET Framework SDK. Those tools that are part of the Framework are in the main directory for the version of the Framework that you are running. For example, they are in the directory C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 if you install version 1.1 of the .NET Framework to the default location. The .NET installation process automatically adds this directory to your environment path .

  The tools provided with the SDK are in the Bin subdirectory of the directory in which you install the SDK. This directory is not added to your path automatically, so you must manually edit your path in order to have easy access to these tools.

  Most of the tools support short and long forms of the command- line switches that control their functionality. This chapter always shows the long form, which is more informative but requires additional typing. For the shortened form of each switch, see the tool's documentation in the .NET Framework SDK.