Who am I?
My name is Andrew Cooper. I’m a computer systems engineer living in Sydney Australia with my wife and two children. I was born in 1972 and fell in love with computers at the age of 10 when my parents bought a Commodore 64.
I have a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Systems) degree from the University of Technology, Sydney. I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).
Since 1990 I have worked for a large aerospace manufacturing company in the south-western suburbs of Sydney. My work has included system/network administration (Windows/Unix/Cisco/AD/Exchange), application administration (SMARTeam), system integration, security design, and some programming (C, VB, VBScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, ASP, SQL, etc).
Outside of my work I have designed and built my church’s website and, in the process, learned PHP, CSS, XHTML and MySQL. I also created my first open source project – a plug-in for Community Builder that adds a “Confirm E-Mail” field to the registration form.
So what’s this blog about?
In March 2010 the company I work for announced they were closing the manufacturing site I work at in late 2012. So I had 2-and-a-half years to work out what the next step in my career would be.
I really get a kick out of software development (pushing 1′s and 0′s around), so I decided I’d like to move into software engineering. Catch is, although I have programming experience, most of it is in scripting and I haven’t had the opportunity in my work to use a modern language like C#.
So, here I am learning C# and .NET, and I thought it would be fun to take you along for the ride. In this blog I’ll be posting my experience of learning C# and .NET, including references, code snipets, full sample programs, and plenty more. I hope my experience will be helpful to others learning C# as well.
I’m going to be assuming a certain amount of programming knowledge. I won’t be explaining basic concepts like functions, classes, objects, etc. I will however be explaining the implementation of these concepts in C#. I hope you enjoy the ride.
