T40T, 6th June 2008 to 9th June 2008

By Nick Hodge | June 8, 2008

(kitteh codez: ./;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;)

Time to start C# familiarisation, this long weekend is the weekend to start. My guide is the book: “Pro C# 2008 and the .Net 3.5 Platform” written by Andrew Troelson

Having last been semi-professional in Java about 10 years ago, there are many similarities. But lots of new platform learnings. Unix shell, paths and commands are difficult things to dump.

Just ensuring I understand the fundamentals before I jump into the deep end of the BCL and other .Net goodness

So, some new things:

using the Visual Studio Command Prompt to pre-setup paths
@*.rsp files for input to csc.exe (to replace command lines)
Console.* and Environment.* for command-line/console style apps; along with return values
Escape characters vs. @”sss” verbatim strings
Narrowing/Widening datatypes at compile time (short/ints)
out, ref, params (leave params as last argument)
operator overloading (sans generics), arrays, simple objects, enums'
structs on the stack, vs referenced types on heap
Nullable types (using ? at the end of the type declaration, ?? as default override if value is null)
Objects, default constructors
constructor chaining using this. keyword
Encapsulation using properties (auto getters and setters, or Accessors and Mutators)
partials (one class across multiple *.cs files)
class diagrams; same 3 base things of OO programming (encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism)
base class construction
nested classes
virtual, override in polymorphism; as keyword + null test in polymorphism
SEH. Structured exception handling
The heap, generations as a method of marking objects as “more likely to stick around” in System.GC
Finalize. Finalize when unmanaged (ie: Pinvoke) objects
Dispose. call Dispose on an object that implements IDisposable (if x is IDisposable…)