Hour 1. A C Programming Tour

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Hour 1. A C# Programming Tour

Learning a new programming language can be intimidating. If you've never programmed before, the act of typing seemingly cryptic text to produce sleek and powerful applications probably seems like a black art, and you may wonder how you'll ever learn everything you need to know. The answer is, of course, one step at a time. The first step to learning a language is the same as that of any other activity ”building confidence. Programming is part art and part science. Although it may seem like magic, it's more akin to illusion; after you know how things work, a lot of the mysticism goes away, freeing you to focus on the mechanics necessary to produce the desired result.

In this hour, you'll complete a quick tour that takes you step-by-step through creating a complete, albeit small, C# program. I've yet to see a "Hello World" program that's the least bit helpful (they usually do nothing more than print "hello world" to the screen ”oh, fun). So instead, you'll create a picture-viewer application that lets you view Windows bitmaps and icons on your computer. You'll learn how to let a user browse for a file and how to display a selected picture file on the screen, both of which are skills that will come in handy in later applications that you create. Creating large, commercial solutions is accomplished by way of a series of small steps. After you've finished creating this small project, you'll have an overall feel for the development process.

The highlights of this hour include the following:

• Building a simple, yet functional, C# application

• Letting a user browse a hard drive

• Displaying a picture from a file on disk

• Getting familiar with some programming lingo

• Learning about the Visual Studio ”C# IDE

I hope that by the end of this hour, you'll realize just how much fun it is to program using C#.

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