 Hey everybody, this is Brian and welcome to our first C-Sharp tutorial. So what is C-Sharp? Why do you need to know it? If you go to Wikipedia and you look up C-Sharp, you can see there's just a massive amount of information and a lot of it is this acronym soup like .NET, ECMA, ISO, blah, blah, blah, blah. What in the world is C-Sharp? Well, C-Sharp is a new language developed by Microsoft specifically to work with the .NET framework. Now it is an ECMA standard and an ISO standard now, meaning it doesn't have to work with .NET. It's a language in itself, but Microsoft designed it primarily to work with .NET. .NET is language agnostic, meaning it doesn't matter what language you use. You use Visual Basic, you use C-Sharp, C++, it doesn't matter. So why learn C-Sharp? I mean there's always other languages, why even bother learning it? Well, Microsoft designed this from the ground up. They actually hired this guy, Anders Heisberg, who if you know his name, you know that he was the lead architect of Delphi. I think they also hired some very strong Java people too to design this whole architecture from the ground up. And basically what they've done is they've designed this thing to be an entirely new language for the modern era because most of the other languages were designed years and years ago. So they're very archaic and hard to work with. C-Sharp happens to be my personal favorite. I love working with the language. So you can just kind of go out here and read up on some stuff. It's a general purpose object-oriented programming language, strong type checking, array bounds checking, garbage collection, internalization, it's for use in embedded systems, operating systems up to web systems. I mean you name it, you can do it. There's a lot of history behind C-Sharp. You don't really need to know it, but it'd be good to get familiar with it. One of the myths is that C-Sharp only runs on Windows, and that's not true. If you go to monoproject.com, and excuse me, no, Mono is not what's making my throat choke up. It's just very dry in here. Mono is a compiler for Linux and Mac OS, I should say, where you can take C-Sharp code and recompile it for that platform. So it doesn't really matter what platform you're on. Now it's come under some heavy criticism because there's always going to be a step behind Microsoft, and it's not as good as this, and it's not as good as that. Well, it's a fairly new project, so I think people should really cut it some slack. That being said, if you're going to do cross-platform, there are better tools out there, such as, you know, the cute tutorials that we've been doing. To do the C-Sharp programming, one thing you're going to need to do is go out to Microsoft. So say Microsoft.com, and go to Express. Microsoft.com slash Express. And what you're going to need to do is download the Visual Studio Express for C-Sharp. So when you get out here, you'll see there's a bunch of things. There's for Windows Phone, for Visual Web, Visual Basic. You want the one for Visual C-Sharp 2010 Express. Now, if you've done the Visual Basic tutorials, you're probably thinking, well, I've already downloaded this note. You need to download the Visual C-Sharp 2010 Express. The Express versions only handle one language. They do one thing, and they do it very well, and they are a lead-in to, you guessed it, Visual Studio. Visual Studio, unfortunately, costs a lot of money to the tune of several thousand dollars, but it's a very high-performance professional tool. I do use it every day, actually, and I love it. But for these tutorials, I'm going to use the Visual C-Sharp 2010 Express. The reason why is very simple. It's free. It's within the price range of everybody. So it doesn't matter if you make a million dollars or two dollars, you can still do this, and you can do it very easily. So let's just click here, and I'm not going to walk you through the entire installation. It was actually fairly fast on my system. You just install now in whatever language you want, and it walks you through it. Now, it's pretty similar to what you're used to. Here's actually a screenshot of what it looks like. This is the C-Sharp language right here. As you notice, it's very similar to Java and some other languages out there, and that was one of the criticisms of C-Sharp is that it was a Java clone. I've worked with Java. I've worked with C-Sharp, and I can tell you the syntax may be the same, but they are two totally different languages, and they have different quirks. They have just different personalities about them. I prefer C-Sharp mainly because most of my work is actually done on Windows systems. That being said, if you're programming on Windows, C-Sharp with .NET is the de facto way to program. They do have the C++ common language interface, so you can use C++ and bind directly into the .NET framework, but it's kind of clunky and hard to work with. At least that's my opinion. I like C-Sharp much better. It's much smoother, easier to work with. And if you've worked with Java, fear not, C-Sharp and Java are almost identical in syntax, so you just have to learn a few things. It's been said that if you know Java, you can learn C-Sharp in a day, and if you know C-Sharp, you can learn Java in a day. You just need to learn the frameworks behind them. So go ahead and download the Express version, get it installed, and then we will start working on these tutorials. In the meantime, feel free to check out my website, voidrealms.com. No banners, no advertisements, no garbage. Simply, I have my tutorials in the source code up there, so as I work through the tutorials, they'll be under the C-Sharp section. I don't have anything up there now, because this is obviously the first video, so we'll go into Visual Basic here, and you can just kind of click on one, and it'll have the video, and it'll have the source code. So if you're watching on YouTube, you can get the source code off my website, voidrealms.com. That'll save you a little bit of typing. All right, this is Brian. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial educational and entertaining.