C#: How fast can I get going?

-C#: How fast can I get going?-

A friend of mine is working on learning some coding. He’s learning with C# and using Microsoft Visual Studio for an IDE. This seems like a reasonable place to start. He had a bunch of coding 101-type questions and I figured this would be a good chance to recement a few of the basics. Many engineers probably take knowledge like “what is an object” or “what is a class variable” for granted. I’m of the belief that one can demonstrate their understanding of a programming concepts by successfully teaching it to someone else.
So, I thought I’d create a very simple C# program to show my friend a few of the basics regarding classes. I could see several benefits in doing this:

1. Prove that I could teach someone else what I know (and learn valuable lessons about how to structure future knowledge sharing sessions)
2. Practice some technical writing – it’s important to be able to explain things to someone in written form and actually have them understand
3. The main impetus of this exercise: Challenge myself to see how fast I could get up and running with a new programming language
   

I had written a little bit of C# code many years ago in one of my Computer Science courses but that is about it. I wanted to see how quickly I could get going with C# and write a program to demonstrate a few programming basics (only slightly more advanced than “Hello World” in the scheme of things, but I was mostly aiming to complete something within an hour). Here is what I did in about an hour:

Followed Microsoft’s “Get Started” Guide.

Pain point: The command dotnet new console didn’t work in VSCode. Solution: Rebooted computer – apparently the environmental path didn’t get updated/linked properly to VSCode after installing the .NET Core SDK.

Once the pre-requsites were set up I initialized a C# project. I like how doing this automatically generates a “Hello World” program for you as a starting point.

I was able to quickly set up a sample class (House class) and then in the Program class create a few house objects to show how they can be operated on, the difference between static class variables and instance variables, etc.

The part that took the longest was actually typing up a README.md and writing explanations. Next longest was getting my local environment set up and troubleshooting a few issues. Writing C# code felt very similar to other OOP languages like Java. There are of course some differences but for someone familiar with Java C# seems easy to pick up.

Here’s a link to the Code.