Part I, The C Language

Part I, The C# Language

One of the more subtle defects that occur in code is failure to recognize the various rules related to operators, expressions, and control structures. Chapter 1, "Operators, Expressions, and Control Structures," details those rules and how best to utilize them, including topics such as operator precedence and associativity, data type conversions, and understanding logical expressions.

C# is an object-oriented programming language and as such places a strong emphasis on the use of objects within the .NET Framework and the code that you write. Chapter 2, "Objects and Components," starts with basic recipes concerning object creation and ends with advanced topics such as polymorphism, abstract classes, and multiple interface inheritance.

As you see in Chapter 3, "Strings and Regular Expressions," strings play a major role in any programming language. The .NET Framework contains a rich set of classes that aid the developer when working with this data type. Furthermore, regular expressions allow you to take string data and perform input validation and substring replacement.

Very rarely will you work with single bits of data when creating an application. More often than not, you need to utilize collections to store several items of a similar type. Chapter 4, "Creating and Using .NET Collections," covers the fundamental collection types in the .NET Framework, including searching and sorting those collections, as well as recipes that aid in creating your own collection type.

Delegates and events form the eventing system within the .NET Framework. Although a majority of event handlers respond to user -interface interaction, the model used in the .NET Framework allows any object to fire or receive events. Chapter 5, "Delegates and Events," contains several recipes that cover the intricacies of delegates and events.

Application errors are an everyday occurrence. Not to be confused with regular defects, exceptions and errors are used extensively within the .NET Framework to respond appropriately when something doesn't work correctly. In Chapter 6, "Exceptions in Error Handling," you'll see various techniques outlining the proper way to catch and throw exceptions as well as pass exceptions on to other objects.