Beginning C# 3.0

1.4. Summary

In this chapter you learned how object-oriented programming got its start over four decades ago. This chapter also showed you how to download and install Visual Studio's C# Express Edition. Finally, you wrote a simple program to test the installation to make sure it was done correctly. So, now what?

You could immediately proceed to the next chapter and start reading. Not a good idea. Now that you have a simple program up and running, this is the perfect time to experiment a little. For example, your program doesn't have any text in the program's title bar. Surely C# provides a property that enables you to change the title bar. (Hint: It does provide such a property!) Play around with some of the other properties and see what they do. For example, change the foreground property and see what happens. Each chapter in this book has a set of exercises at the end of the chapter that you should do before reading the next chapter. I realize that you're anxious to move on to the next chapter, but resist the temptation and do the exercises. They'll help crystallize what you've learned in the current chapter and better prepare you for the content of the next chapter. You can find the solutions in Appendix A.

Programming should be fun, and some of that fun comes from discovering what happens if you change this to that. If you see smoke coming out of your computer, don't make that change again. (Just kidding ... you can't hurt your computer if you make an incorrect change to a ...