What's a quick way to familiarize myself with C#, .NET framework, etc?

Question

I just graduated college and will be starting working in about a month and I was asked to familiarize myself with C++, C#, .NET framework for NT Services and web services.

I'd appreciate recommendations on how to familiarize myself with these topics (books? internet links?) in a short time span. I don't expect to be an expert on it in a month but I don't want to be clueless either. I already know C++ and I consider myself to be fairly proficient in it and I know the basics of C# even though I haven't used it all that much. For C# I do own a book called O'Reilley Programming C#.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would start by pulling down Microsoft's Visual Studio Express products. Your O'Reilly book is a perfectly good book to start with.

Start reading blogs and listening to podcasts, to begin to familiarize yourself with all of the technologies out there that surround c#. You will be very excited about what you can learn. Here are some of the better ones:

http://www.hanselminutes.com/

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

http://channel9.msdn.com/

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

http://weblogs.asp.net/

In addition, the MSDN library is an invaluable resource. You can almost always find what you need there. This is where the reference for the entire .NET framework lives.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

Happy hunting!

Answer 2

Nothing beats actually using the language. As much as some of the information sources already quoted would be very useful to check out, I'd say make sure that you at least try and write some concrete C#.

The best place to start might be a non-trivial-but-not-too-large application that you have already written in something you know, and try to convert it to C#... even better if you can get somebody proficient in C# to peer-review your results to make suggestions where you could make better use of the language-specific features that may be new to you.

Fundamentally, if you just read books and watch videos, you may feel like you actually know it, but it is nothing like doing it yourself (as my Uni maths classes taught me... a good teacher can make the impossible look trivial on a blackboard).

Answer 3

That is a huge surface area. Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform by Andrew Troelsen is a good place to start.

These are good podcasts that will give you an overview:

.NET Rocks

dnrTV

Herding Code

Answer 4

Microsoft Labs and Webcasts

Answer 5

Here's a good SO thread with lots of resources. I recommend you check out MSDN Virtual Labs. They have lots of great training that let's you get your hands on the technology, in particular, check out the C# ones.

Answer 6

I was in the same situation in late November 2008. If you are familiar with IDEs and another programming language, download Visual Studio Express and start playing with it. It's free :)

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

And I always recommend this webpage:

http://www.java2s.com/Tutorial/CSharp/CatalogCSharp.htm

Answer 7

You can select the relative topic you are interested on this stackoverflow site based on the tag name, and read through some posts, it will give you a good feeling what are common issues/challenges people face in day-to-day programming.

Answer 8

One way is listening to podcasts. We do one called Deep Fried Bytes that contains a variety of topics on any and everything.