More learning references

As I’ve been working on learning C# and .NET in the last couple of weeks, I’ve come across a number of useful references beyond the tutorials and other things I list in my second post.  They range from books, to posters, to podcasts, and I’ll briefly look at them in this post.

Class Library references and posters

MSDN has a very complete reference of the .NET Framework Class Library, but, given the shear number of namespaces and classes in the framework, it’s difficult to just browse and find something that looks like what you’re looking for.  What I want is a basic reference, preferably a PDF that I can print, that lists the namespace hierarchy, along with the classes, structs and other types in each namespace, and a brief description of each.  In my hunt for such a reference I came across a couple of posters illustrating portions of the .NET class library:

• The .NET Framework 3.5 Namespace poster, as the name suggests, shows the commonly used namespaces and types in the 3.5 version of the .NET framework.
• The .NET Framework 4 and Extensions poster shows the namespaces and types that are new in 4.0.

There was another poster I found of the new stuff in version 4.0 which I downloaded and printed, but now that I come to write about it I can’t seem to find it again to link to, and the file seems to have disappeared from my disk.  Weird.

Anyway, these posters weren’t exactly what I was looking for.  If anyone knows of a reference such as I’ve described above, lease let me know.  Failing that I may have to put my growing C# skills to the test by writing a small program to parse the HTML of the MSDN Library and produce the reference myself.

Coding style guidelines

Given that the programming I have done over the last 10 years or so has been fairly ad-hoc, and in a range of languages, I felt a bit out-of-touch with current thinking regarding coding style.  MSDN has some guidelines, but they’re mostly around naming conventions.  I wanted to find something a bit more comprehensive.  I found a few blog posts that talked about various aspects of coding style, but then I came across Lance Hunt’s C# Coding Standards for .NET.  In Lance’s words:

There have been numerous attempts to document C# Coding Standards since the language was released, but most are either overly verbose, too restrictive, or try to cover every single scenario.  This is my attempt to start from scratch and write a new standards document that is concise, simple to read & use, and creates a pragmatic balance of rule enforcement.  Having said that, I'm sure that many of you will have just as many disagreements with this document as I have with others, but I am always up for a good debate.

The document is only 20 or so pages long and is a good, concise style reference.  I’m not going to be following it religiously, but I will use it as a guide as I write my code.

Blogs, forums and podcasts

I’ve also looked around for resources I can use to keep up on developments in the .NET universe, and also communities where questions can be answered, etc.  I don’t really have the time for reading too many blogs, but I do get time to listen to podcasts, and to that end I found two that I’m now listening to:

• Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.
• .NET Rocks! is a weekly talk show for anyone interested in programming on the Microsoft .NET platform. The shows range from introductory information to hardcore geekiness.

In my search for resources a few forum sites kept popping up in my Google searches.  The ones that really annoy me are the ones that make the questions freely viewable, but then want to charge you a subscription to see the answers.  A great alternative is Stack Overflow, a free programming Q & A site – lots of questions and quick-response answers on just about any language/platform you can think of.

Books

Last, but definitely not least, in this list of newly-discovered resources, is a book that I found through listening to Hanselminutes – .NET Book Zero by Charles Petzold.  Yes, it’s *that* Charles Petzold, the one whose other book (one of many) taught me Windows 3.1 programming back in Uni.  This book is a great introduction to C# and .NET, and the best bit is … it’s free!

I think that will do for this post.  I’ll put links to some of these resources in the side bar.  Next post we’ll get back to some code.  See you then.