What are the first steps in C#/.NET development?_问答_开发者

Okay, I'm biting the bullet and deci开发者_C百科ding to get into the whole Microsoft/C#/.NET culture and I'm going to do this by putting together a simple (hah!) application.

It will basically be an application in which I want to store images and associate with them other optional things.

It must be able to import images from the filesystem (and hopefully camera/scanner) then allow the user to add text, audio and other information.

I plan to store the images and auxillary information into a database. What the application will do with said data isn't important (yet).

Keep in mind I know absolutely nothing about C# or .NET although, as an old codger, I know a great deal about many other things and will regale/bore you with stories and anecdotes until you quietly slip away :-)

What are the first steps to take in developing such an application? I've already set out UI layouts and likely process flows although it may be that the development environment dictates changes.

Development environment is currently XP SP3 + VS2008 (though I can upgrade if absolutely necessary).

What should I be looking at as the first step? Are there any gotchas I should be looking out for?

Have you decided for win forms or WPF? I've been doing win forms for the past 4 years and WPF was a great discovery for me, with the flexibility it affords. It might be fitted for your application and the different types of content you'll want to add and give you a flexibility that win forms can't give.

As for actually developing, I think loading images from the disk would be the first step, showing them in the UI and getting user input for them - you would get to work with the different objects and see how the framework handles things.

A tutorial about the field validation I mentioned in my comment is here - haven't done it, but something similar. You can also see the xaml code paired with the C# code there.

After looking for the differences between win forms and WPF I found that there are a few win forms controls that are missing from WPF. More on that on MSDN (compariosn chart) and a post from March with a more detailed chart.

It's also worth mentioning that you can include win forms controls in WPF applications and vice versa, but there are some limitations.

Just a couple of pointers, it would be easy to overwhelm you as you are just starting with this tech stack. First step, use SQLServer 2008 Express, it has better ability to deal with image data (images can be saved directly to the filesystem, but they are still in a table).

Apart from that, you can design your screen with the GUI, and then hook the bits up one by one to your retreived data. Create a new Windows Forms app, or a WPF one, and start from there (i'm assuming that you know about the toolbox window and just dragging components on to the designer and setting their properties in the Properties window).

If you're looking win forms you're going to have drag-and-drop UI pretty easily.

If you want to use a database than you're probably going to find MS-SQL the easiest to cooperate with. Look up LINQ-2-SQL, it lets you access your database through an object layer by simply dragging your tables onto a pane.

Fun things to use: extension methods, partial classes, LINQ (query any collection with inline lambdas) and even class/method attributes.

My $0,02:

a) Get to know the platform a bit, types, collections, events/delegates(/lambdas), etc etc

b) Dive into WPF

c) Learn about database connectivity (LINQ2SQL or NHibernate (or ....)

d) Learn about the MVVM pattern to get to deliver solid wpf applications, doing so forces you to dive deeper into the workings of WPF (routed commands, tunneling/bubbleing etc)

e) Learn more about patterns to get a more solid grasp of OO (this: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Explained-Perspective-Object-Oriented/dp/0321247140/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276066663&sr=8-1 is an absolute pearl for that)

f) etc

If you aren't too desperate to get your hands dirty straight away I'd suggest this book: CLR via C#.

It is written for those with programming experience on platforms other than .Net and provides a clear and comprehensive explanation of C# and how it runs on the .NET CLR.

By reading this initially you might avoid writing some of the poorly constructed applications that many of us wrote before properly understanding the technology.