Performance Consulting: A Practical Guide for HR and Learning Professionals

Overview

At this point we've familiarized ourselves with the C# language itself, and are almost ready to the move on to the applied sections of the book, in which we will look at how to use C# to program applications covering a variety of areas. Before we do that, however, we need to examine how we can use the tools and features provided by the .NET environment to get the best from our programs.

In this chapter we will look at what programming in the .NET environment means in practice, covering some of the tools that are available to help you write and debug programs as well as the guidelines for writing good applications. In particular we will examine:

• Visual Studio .NET - the main developer environment in which you will usually write, compile, debug, and optimize your C# programs

• WinCV - a useful utility that allows you to examine the base classes.

• Usage guidelines and naming conventions - the guidelines that you should adhere to when writing C# code, so that your code follows normal .NET practice, and can be easily understood by others.

• This will be followed in the next two chapters by a look at Windows Forms and how to write user interface code in Chapter 8, we'll look at assemblies and resource files.