Hello, World!

That’s an appropriate title for the first post, on the first blog, of a guy who’s starting to learn a new programming language.

Hi, I’m Andrew.  Earlier this year I was told that the company I work for is closing the site I work at in late 2012.  So I’ll be looking for something else to do around that time.  I’m a computer systems engineer and all-round geek with pretty good sys-admin chops.  I’m a fair programmer and I’d like to take my career down the Software Engineering track.

The catch is that most of the programming I’ve been doing in my current job is scripting and system customisation stuff (anyone need a SMARTeam programmer?).  I haven’t really had an opportunity to do much serious application development.  In thinking about my future it became clear that I need to brush up on my skills and familiarise myself with modern languages and programming environments.

To this end I have decided to learn C# and the .NET environment.  I’ll probably dabble in other areas as well, but this will be my focus.  I’ve always found that I retain stuff better if I’m able to teach someone else what I’m learning as I go.  Hence this blog.

The idea of this blog is to document my learning experience and, hopefully, to help others who are learning as well. I’ll be posting about the process I’m following, the development setup I’m using, and, of course, I’ll be posting the code I develop through the whole process.  I hope someone out there finds this helpful – I know I will.

I think that’s enough for my first post.  The next will be the approach I’m planning to take as I delve into the task of learning C#, and some resources I’ve found to help.