Learning the Microsoft Platform for me is like French.  You learnt it badly when you were young, stumbled by with it year in and year out, always promising yourself that one day you’ll do it properly!  For me, that day has come!

So I dusted off my First Edition of Eric Gunnerson’s (c) 2000 A Programmer’s Introduction to C# that was lying around on my bookshelf.  It’s not a great book, but a start.  4 hours later, armed with the syntactic basics of the C# language, I fire up my newly installed Visual Studio Professional.  I’m mildly excited.

The first thing I do in any new IDE is go to their equivalent of Tools | Options and step the enormous amount of configuration options, just see what’s there.  Here’s what I found interesting:

  • Environment | Help | Online - Over a slow connection, go standalone.
  • I tend to separate application from data on my desktop machines, so for me:
    • Change the default location for my Import and Exporting Settings
    • Change the default location for my vstudio projects and templates
  • Configuring the help system, msdn, C# formatting options and debugging.

Okay, I’m ready go.