Chapter 1: Introducing C

Overview

Welcome to the first chapter of the first section of this book. Over the course of this section, you look at the basic knowledge required to get up and running with C#. In this first chapter, you get an overview of C# and the .NET Framework, and you consider what these technologies are, the motivation for using them, and how they relate to each other.

You start with a general discussion of the .NET Framework. This is still a new technology and contains many concepts that are tricky to come to grips with at first (mainly because the Framework introduces a new way of doing things to application development). This means that the discussion will, by necessity, cover many new concepts in a short space of time. However, a quick look at the basics is essential to understand how to program in C#, so this is a necessary evil. Later in the book you will revisit many of the topics covered here in more detail.

After this general discussion, you move on to a simple description of C# itself, including its origins and similarities to C++. Finally, you look at the primary tool used throughout this book: Visual Studio 2005 (VS).