Learning C# Program Design

[dresdor]

Taking the advice of one of my relatives, I'm learning c#. Now, I've come to understand that I learn best by tinkering and playing around with things, and if I have a problem in front of me, I will learn quickly. I understand programming basics well enough, but most of my experience is with console programs (with painful memories of C++ classes), and now I am looking at form applications and non-text based UIs for the first time. This is confusing me greatly, and that's what I'm coming for advice for.

The project I've designed for myself involves reverse engineering a program I used at a previous job. Basically this program was at a prescription filling station, and would pull up orders from a database that could be filled at that station, list each item in the order, allow the user to scan the UPC of the RX item, print a label, scan the label to verify it, and once the order was done, pull up the next order.

Most of that seems fairly simple to me, but what is confusing is the form portions. The form needs a few things I am unable to figure out in Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express. The first part is making an area to display the RX information. What I recall is that it looked much like a spreadsheet. The next is creating an area that lists the username of the person signed onto the station. Finally, similar to that, is a count of the remaining orders to be filled.

Since I do not have a label printer I will be using, I'm going to ignore that whole part of the program, and ignore the second scan of the label (relying only on the RX scan instead). Like I said, this is for fun and to see how close I can get to recreating what real engineers did.

Sorry if I seem like a newb and that there's a common sense solution to this. I'm very new at this, and once I wrap my head around it, I will be able to get better. If anyone has any suggestions to learning this stuff, I'd appreciate it.

[ddanbe]

Hi dresdor, welcome.
My first advice is: If you just found out what you can do with mortar and bricks, don't start building a big cathedral, start with a little house for the dog.
Second advice would be start learning about UI elements of a form, like buttons, DataGridview(your "spreadsheet"), TextBox etc.
You will find lots of info at MSDN, example for textbox:http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/search/en-us?query=TextBox&x=0&y=0
Success! :)

[thines01]

I also suggest that maybe you create a console app in C#.
You will notice a familiarity when receiving input, looping, displaying and other output.

You will also find that coding in C# will also make you a better C++ programmer (in some ways).

I like videos.

http://DnrTV.com is a good resource for watching someone code and hearing an explanation at the same time. Some of the concepts will be completely foreign, but you can get the idea.

There is a lot of programming content on YouTube, also.
...but remember: this is the Internet.

[skatamatic]

C# and C++ are very similar in syntax (although quite a bit different under the hood). Pointers more or less get replaced with references (although you can still use pointers if you enable them using the unsafe keyword) and everything is derived from a base class called 'object'. Once you wrap your head around those 2 concepts you can basically translate between the 2 languages very easily.

But C# extends on C++ with quite a few features. LINQ, the .Net framework, type safety and powerful multithreaded debugging to name a few.

[darkelflemurian]

you can look also for examples over the web or download free projects and then you can have an idea on what you can do. but like they said before, start with something small, and as you go getting practice, the build a cathedral.