Hour 1. Jumping In with Both Feet: A Visual C 2005 Programming Tour

Hour 1. Jumping In with Both Feet: A Visual C# 2005 Programming Tour

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• Building a simple (yet functional) Visual 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 .NET IDE

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 might 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 might 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, Visual C# 2005 program. Most introductory programming books start out with the reader creating a simple Hello World 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 screenoh, 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 these skills will come in handy in the real-world applications that you'll create.

Producing large, commercial solutions is accomplished by way of a series of small steps. After you've finished creating the project in this hour, you'll have a feel for the overall development process and will have taken the first step toward becoming an accomplished programmer. In fact, you will be building upon this Picture Viewer program in subsequent chapters. By the time you complete this book, you will have built a robust application, complete with sizable screens, an intuitive interface, and professional error handling.

By the end of this hour, you'll realize just how much fun it is to program using Visual C# 2005.