Head First C# Chapter 1

As a part of my new job I will have to learn C#.

So I went and bought the book Head First C#. I love the head first series. They are designed with my brain in mind. However, all of the examples are with the beta version of Visual Studio for C# 2008. When I went to download the program, it had been officially released.

I am running into a few things that are slightly different and will be happy to document what I find in case someone else runs into the same issues. This is from a default install of the IDE and I am learning as I go.

On Page 9
The “Reset Window Layout” didn’t work the same so I had to add most of the windows manually to the interface.

The Error List is located under View -> Error List
The Class View also located under View -> Class View
The Properties Window is located in View -> Properties Window

On Page 12
As I am very new to all of the development products from Microsoft I had to learn that if you want to keep the tool box open you have to click on the push pin in the top right corner of the window.

On Page 18
My database didn’t set up properly the first time I tried the program. So after searching around I found the service SQLSERVERAGENT was set to manual and I had to start it before I could continue.

On Page 29
Be sure that after you enter all of the card data (I am assuming with the errors 🙂 ) that you do not tab down or click on the next line. It will cause an invalid pointer error when you try to save all of the information. If you run into this simply click on a row with data in it and then you can click the Save All button.

On Page 32
I didn’t have the Data Sources tab available. If you ran into this as well you will need to go to the Data menu option and select Show Data Sources. This will put it in a place that is consistent with the book.

I am not sure what clicking the little arrow does (bullet point 2). It didn’t work for me so I just clicked the + on the other side of People to show the columns.