walterburke

Hello Everyone

If you have a background in Java, it will help you to move to .NET. I learned Java before .NET, and I found that many, many items have the same names or work the same in the .NET Framework. C# as a language is extraordinarily similar to Java in terms of using the basic language.

If this were 2005 or 2006, I would tell you that you are good to go, but in the last few years, the .NET world has undergone a silent upheaval. While it is still possible to write code as if it was Java or VB6 with a slightly different syntax and set of library calls, there have been fundamental changes in how .NET code can be written. For example, the new ADO.NET stuff with the Entity Framework provides an entire ORM system that did not exist before. LINQ offers a universal method for querying/updating data, regardless of whether it came from a database, XML file, or is just an object in memory. And while Win Forms are still around, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is clearly the wave of the future; looking at some apps that I have used that run on top of WPF, I am really impressed with it. For Web Services, the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) system has been very useful, from what I hear.

Even in terms of how you write code, there have been a lot of changes, particularly in C#. In the last year or so, a lot of the C# people I know are suddenly declaring their variables as "var" instead of explicitly stating a type, for example. There have been some new ideas around "programming to the interface" not "programming to the class". Quite honestly, I have not kept up with these changes; when I learned C#, I basically was still writing code like I did in Turbo Pascal but with C# instead of Pascal. Does my code work? Yup. Is it easy to read and maintain? Yup. But at the same time, I suspect that I really need to learn C# from scratch with the most current ideas and techniques and take what I like from that. I think a lot of the recent innovations may have a lot to offer, but I can't fully judge them yet.

Regards
Walter Burke