Programming job options...

wizarddeath

Sorry for making 2 topics now on the front page, but I just been introduced to a new part of our business today.

Company has quite a few programmers, they basically program in C#. Ive toyed around with alittle bit of the light work and like it. Im considering making the jump into learning C#, however as much as I know is C# is a Microsoft .net invention(?), so Im not sure how far through out the field that could take me.

I know it's derived from C++ which comes from basic C, but how far off are they? If anyone knows a better board they could point me to, I wouldnt mind either.

Thanks!

Darthn3ss

C# (in my limited experience with everything programming) is a good mix of C++, Java, and VB, as far as similarity to those languages. I kinda liked it when i was playing with it; but i'm not much of a programmer - it honestly bores me :P

All in all, i'd say C# is more like java than C/C++

Tesl

The above poster is correct, C# has more familiarities with Java than C or C++. It's object orientated, is executed in a similar fashion to Java (In that it is not compiled) but is arguably slightly cleaner than Java. I prefer it to Java actually.

C# is technically an open standard, so not limited to any one OS. In practice though support is far better on Windows, and it will continue to be that way. Depending on your background this may or not matter (For me it does matter, which is why I rarely ever code anything in C#)

C is a procedural language without OO support, so don't expect it to be much like C#. C++ is more familiar, but still has a lot of quirks, and puts you closer to the metal in terms of memory management. This gives you a few extra things to think about in terms of correctly freeing memory when it is no longer needed, and taking care of problems like endian issues (when porting between different processor families for example)

I think any good professional programmer should be familiar with those issues though, which are hidden for Java/C# programmers. It is definitely way easier to pick up Java/C# if you already have C++ under your belt (Within a couple of weeks I was able to build fairly advanced C# applications, so go figure)