Have you ever gotten excited about learning something and wanted to share?!?! I’ll probably write a few posts about my experiences. I’m taking a “Introduction to C# Programming Class” at Grand Rapids Community College. It’s been a while since I was in a college setting (and book prices are insane, the next book I write will be for colleges). I graduated 15+ years ago from college. And I went for Business. That’s another story. If you follow my blog, you probably wonder why I would take a C# programming class. I’m not a full-time programmer nor have I had formal a programming class, until now. I’ve always respected developers who can develop (notice I didn’t say “just code”). They know how to design, architect and all around perform code miracles. I don’t expect the class to make me the next guru. I’d like to get some foundational principals that can be used in future projects.
The first class tonight (1/7) covered the basics, history of C# and a few others. It was cool! As the instructor was talking about the history portion. I remember being at Microsoft in July of 2000 listening to Anders Hejlsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg talk about C# and the .NET framework. After the first 5 minutes of Anders presentation, I was lost, but was hooked on wanting to understand more. I decided then I would conquer learning OOP (yes 10 years and I’m still learning). We’ll be learning some OOP basics, which I’m all geeked about. (Yes geeked!!) My first assignment is due in a couple weeks, the format is straight forward. An “Assignment” has three exercises, each exercise is 1 program. This is where I got really excited. I read the first assignment and said, well glad I’m in school cause I’m not sure where to begin. 🙂 I wasn’t too good with story problems in school, I re-read the first assignment and said yup. Glad I’m in school.
Here is a portion of the first problem.
“A program that calculates an approximate cost to fertilize a customer’s yard” I have to collect some information, calculate this, get some more stuff, calculate more and display to the user. Yeah ok sure. I’m confident things will work out. Just because I know the history of C# doesn’t make me any smarter on doing the homework.
Well, I’m off but stay tuned for more stories. It’s like a roller coaster, up, down, twist and it’s adventure!
Happy C# programming,
Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS
Pondering Thought 