Visual Studio 8.0 for C#

Visual Studio 8.0 for C#

When I taught myself Java some years back, I started out using the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that was fashionable at the time--and I found that it so obscured what was going on, that I decided to just code Java using my favorite editor, running the Java compiler from the command line, and using JDB to debug it. This worked well. I discovered when I was interviewing for new positions, this was regarded as somewhat peculiar. One person I interviewed with expressed amazement that it was even possible to program a user interface in Java without using an IDE.

I'm teaching myself C#, using Microsoft Visual Studio 8.0 for C#, which is an IDE. I really enjoy it. As much as my previous IDE experience with Java left me more confused than helped, I suspect that it was because I was trying to teach myself both object-oriented programming (OOP) and Java simultaneously. I started with procedural programming languages, and this might have been too much of a hurdle to have this many new learning experiences simultaneously.

Even with this very nice IDE, writing a Windows application is necessarily fairly complex, especially when compared to the traditional C program using printf and gets! Anyway, if my job is still there on Monday, great! I'll be ready to throw myself into C# for the project that I am hoping will be taking me on board. If not, I can hope that there is some employer out there who will see some value in the applications on which I have worked in the past, and decide that they can afford the time it will take for me to become completely proficient with C++ or C#. (I would love to do Java, but there's no shortage of kids fresh out of school with a year or two of Java--and obviously, no one is going to hire a fossil with the same amount of Java experience.)