Monday, August 16, 2010

New to C#, Visual Studio, and SQL Server

I've had a lot of questions recently for developers who are new to C# and Visual Studio for some guidance as to where to begin. So, I've compiled a list of links that will help you get started:

  • Intro to Visual Studio 2008 – Even if you’re using Visual Studio 2010 this tutorial can still help you with the basics. If you’re in a rush skip forward 4 minutes and 44 seconds into it.
  • Intro to C# and VS2008 – Good 15 minute intro to Studio and C#, although the accent can be a little hard to understand.
  • SQL and SQL Express Intro – Covers some basics of how to manage databases with these tools.
  • MVC in 4 minutes - a video by yours truly on building a quick MVC app.
  • Intro to MVC Basics – A good intro (73 minutes long) starting from File->New Project
  • Dave Mateer has written an excellent blog post about how to
    setup nunit-gui.exe with Visual Studio Express.

I’ll add more to this post as I collect more links and tutorials.

4 comments:

Valério Farias said...

Hello Jonathan

I would like to know what Version Control System (VCS) do you use in Your project:

I saw in the table of content of your book: Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC,
Chapter about TDD and Continuos Integration with MSBuild.

But, about VCS What do you use in ThougWorks: Git, SVN, Mercurial?

Is your VCS repository configured in a Windows Server?

I wait your comment.

A hug.

Anonymous said...

Hi Valerio,

At ThoughtWorks we use all three. Most projects I've been on have used SVN, but I see most ThoughtWorkers moving towards Git and Mercurial because they liked the distributed version control.

I actually don't show how to use VCS in the book - there just isn't space to do so. However I would recommend either the GIT or SVN Book by Pragmatic Bookshelf as good place to learn.

Hope that helps,

Jonathan

Valério Farias said...

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for the reply.

About the Git: Your git server is installed in a Windows Server or Linux Server. Or your staff use a private account in github.

And tell me your twitter account if you have.

Jonathan McCracken said...

A lot of ThoughtWorkers who are working on open-source or on their own stuff use github. From my point of view this is one of the great strengths of git is github.

To my knowledge ThoughtWorks doesn't have a private github, but I've heard of some teams using git and then a master subversion repository to handle check-ins.

Frankly, I've never used Git or Mecruial (I guess I'm just not that cool) - so as per installations on Linux and Windows I can't comment.

However, in responding to your comment I found this resource to be very useful for someone coming from an SVN background: http://utsl.gen.nz/talks/git-svn/intro.html

Hope that helps,

Jonathan