VB.NET Developer looking for C# Help

[tailz]

Hi peeps,

I'm a VB.NET developer and have been for years now. Before that was VB6 and VB4 (before that was Turbo Pascal, Quick Basic and Quick C

As my job/career has "developed" I've recently started moving into the DirectX world and its clear that it wants me to code in C++ or C# and I am quite prepared to do so as converting code from C# to VB.NET is becoming rather tiresome.

Anyway, could anyone please give me examples of the differences I need to study in C# to VB.NET please? I am not looking for the blatently obvious e.g. variable declarations etc but a little more in depth differences. For example the differences in Event handling, multi-threading, error handling and Interfaces. I also notice stuff like

if (blah == functionName(z,y)) {
  <do stuff>;
}

...and I actually am not 100% sure what the IF statement is testing. So then again, maybe I do need a newbies guide to C#

If anyone could suggest a book then that would be great too.

nuff rambling, thanks for any help guys and gals

gaz

[stimbo]

This is meant to be a good C# book:

Murach's C# 2005

Looking to move into C# myself and plan to get it. I know someone who has it who really likes it. Very 'real' (i.e. practical) examples which help lots.

Here's a link to Chapters 2 & 3 if you want to have a quick look:

2 Free Chapters

Chapter 2 is very basic and probably not much use if you are already familar with .NET, chapter 3 starts showing some C# code. You can also download ALL the code used in all the chapters as a Zip file which will give you quite a nice collection of code examples that are used throughout the book.

[nmadd]

These will be helpful as well. Differences between VB.NET and C#:
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/vb...difference.asp
http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/vbnet...omparison.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308470

[David Anton]

There a nice little O'Reilly book named "C# & VB.NET Conversion" by Jose Mojica, which unfortunately was never kept up to date beyond 2003.

Also, check out the various on-line and commercial (trial/demo) VB to C# converters.

Regarding "blah == functionName(z,y)": putting the value to test at the beginning is an old C holdover that is unnecessary in C#. (It's purpose was to help avoid accidentally using an assignment instead of an equality comparison - C# requires 'if' conditionals to always be a boolean test, so you can't accidentally use an assignment where you want an equality test in C#).

[penagate]

[...] C# requires 'if' conditionals to always be a boolean test, so you can't accidentally use an assignment where you want an equality test in C#).

That's not to say that you can't include assignments in conditional expressions, though, but you need to make sure that the expression evaluates to either true or false overall.

int var;
if ((var = somefunc()) > 0)

In case tailz is confused: assignment and equality are two different operators in C-based languages: = and ==, respectively.


Moved from VB.NET.

[David Anton]

Right - as I said, the overall conditional must evaluate to a boolean test.
But the compiler will catch the sloppy cases (when coding in C/C++ the compiler doesn't) so there's no need for the "blah == functionName()" kludge in C#.

[tailz]

Awesome cheers guys.

Actually made a boo-boo in original post and was sposed to be using the assignment operator DOH, so basically I suggested I didnt even know what an if statement did lol :]

What I was sposed to say is I didnt understand what part of the IF that the following would be testing.

int var;
if ((var = somefunc()) > 0) {
}

As I understand it now, the result of somefunc() goes into "var" and then the if does the boolean on "var" (if it was a bool)... That Right?

I'm a competent coder (honest ) - I'm already starting to read some of it without rearranging the code into VB.NET in me head which is good, tis what you're used to I guess.

anyway the links have proved very useful and I may order a couple of those books cheers

The link from harding.edu I initally found very handy

Cheers all

gaz