Mark Thomas

After about 10 years working primarily in Java, I’m a few weeks in to my first commercial C# project. The transition was much smoother than I’d expected and after some head-scratching around the syntax additions in C# 3, I feel productive.

I’m surprised how little time I have needed to spend learning the .NET framework libraries and exploring the .NET open source community.  As a business app, most of the code I am writing models the domain and interacts with other parts of the domain; it is all written by the team.  With the exception of things like the collections classes, most of the framework/library interaction is on the fringes of the system.  That said I’ve done my fair share of Googling things like ‘How do I parse XML in .NET’, but the community is large and so it’s easy to find solutions to problems. A harder part is learning C# idioms, the Manning book C# in Depth was great for this (see later) as were chats with my teammates and pair.

Along the way I’ve picked up a few useful resources:

Resources

• A Comparison of Microsoft’s C# Programming Language to Sun Microsystems’ Java Programming Language

This is great when you are still thinking in Java. It maps Java features on to C# and points out areas where features exist in Java but not C# and vice versa.

• C# in Depth

Despite the name, this book is very approachable and has great coverage of the evolution of C# from v1 through to v3.

• The C# Programming Language for Java Developers

Quite dry but some useful advice from MSDN.

Other thoughts

• Get Resharper

If you are familiar with Java IDEs like Eclipse or IntelliJ and regularly re-factor then you will need Resharper. The out of the box support for refactoring is minimal even in VS2008.

• Remember there is an eco-system outside of Microsoft

Many companies having selected .NET will automatically favour Microsoft solutions for everything. Even though the open-source community doesn’t appear as vibrant as for Java, it does exist. Check out alt.net too.