Course: Programming C# 6

C# and the .NET Framework provide a complex set of tools and technologies for building software applications on multiple platform. This course covers the basics of what .NET is—along with a bit of history, and where Visual Studio and C# fit into it. Don will explore a simple .NET application so that you can begin to see the structure of both C# code and .NET projects. Then he'll delve into the C# language and why it is so compelling a tool for application development.

Nothing is stopping you from using your favorite text editor and command-like tools to build .NET projects, but Visual Studio provides an environment that will help you be much more productive. In this course you'll learn about some of the best features of Visual Studio and learn how to create complete solutions with it. You'll also learn about the rich support for debugging in both C# and Visual Studio, so you can hunt down the causes for problems in your applications.

The purpose of any general-purpose programming language is to provide a syntax that supports various features to manipulate data and interact with its environment. C# has rich support for this kind of syntax, and you'll begin to explore it in this course. You'll learn about the structure of C# code, then will start to learn about C# statements and expressions that let you perform complex operations with your code.

Variables and data types are a core feature of any programming language, and you'll learn about them in this course. You'll see how to name, declare, and initialize variables, as well as a way to let the compiler determine the appropriate data type, and why you may or may not want to do that. Then you'll learn about many of the built-in data types provided by C# and the .NET Framework, letting you manage just about any kind of data in memory. The course wraps up with a look at three advanced types: constants, enumerations, and structures.

Data types and variables are a fundamental part of learning to program, and C# provides a robust set of language features to work with variables and data in memory. In this course, you’ll learn about many variable data types, as well as how to convert between them and how to handle null values. You’ll also learn about altering and evaluating data with operators, from simple mathematical functions like addition and subtraction to logical and other advanced operators.

The .NET framework is a collection of thousands of rich objects you can use in your code, and it’s one of the compelling reasons to use C#. Using .NET classes can save you a lot of work in providing basic infrastructure to your C# applications. In this course, you’ll learn about some of the many classes and objects the .NET framework, as well as more sophisticated techniques for using some of its more advanced data types. In particular, you’ll learn about the support the .NET framework provides for working with strings, files, and dates.

C# provides a number of methods for making decisions as code executes. You can branch execution of your code based on conditions you define—anything from a simple check on the value of a variable to the value of a complex expression that you create—with if and switch statements. Another common technique is to execute one block of code over and over again until some condition is met, which can be accomplished with the various kinds of loops provided by C#. Finally, C# supports jumping to locations in code outside of the normal sequential order of statements. You’ll even learn some narrow and specific uses for the much-maligned goto operator.

Classes are one of the fundamental concepts of C# application development, because you’ll often need to work with more complex data than C#’s base data types. Classes serve as a blueprint or design: They can’t be used directly as components of an application, but you can use them to create objects whose form and behavior you control. In this course, you’ll learn about classes and objects in C#, and then learn how to create your own classes, how to declare and define them, how to use them to store data, and how to imbue them with behaviors.