If you know what casting is, this will be easy for you

A byte is a small integer that has a maximum value of 255, if you want to save 315 in that byte variable, you will need to widen it to an integer for example.

string myString;
myString = “Hi There, i am a string”;

Parsing
Assuming your string is
string myStringInteger = “10″;

and you want to get that value in an integer variable
You can simply use the parse keyword
int myInteger = int.Parse(myStringInteger);

You can do that to a boolean variable as well
string myBoolString = “True”;
bool myBool = bool.Parse(myBoolString);

Strings come with extra functionality as well.

myBoolString.Length will be equal to 4 since True has 4 letters.

Strings are no good for efficiency, rather you would want to use StringBuilder for larger texts

You may also be interested in knowing that although a string is not a value type, the == operator is overloaded to mean “Is the content identical in both strings”, If you don’t know why this is strange, You will find out as you read

Here i am not talking about arrays or more complex structures, the basic variable declaration and initialization is as follows

Lines that start with // are not for the compiler, they are comments and effectivly ignored on compile

//Declare an integer
int myInteger;
//Give it initial value
myInteger = 15;
//Declare and Initialize @ once
int myOtherInteger = 16;
//Declare More than 1 variable at once
int var1, var2, var3;
//More on one line, Declare and initialize many
int var4 = 45, var5 = 46, var6 = 47;

Surely you can replace int with float or string or bool or any other.

But for the most part of this text we will use the functionality from System.Console class to display the output of our programs

Console.WriteLine(“A string”);

prints A string, if you want to print variables

Console.WriteLine(“Var1 {0} Var2: {1} Var4: {3} Var3: {2}”, var1, var2, var3, var4);

this will print the variables within the string, notice that Var4 and Var3 are reversed in the string, the variables takes the indexes 0, 1, 2, 3… you can use {0} more than once to print variable var1 more than once.

On a relevant note, Console.WriteLine will print the string on a new string, if you do not want that you can use Console.Write in the same way

1- C# is case sensitive, so myVariable is not the same as MyVariable
2- The entry point of the program by default returns void (You can change that into an integer if you insist on your program returning a zero for ok or an error code), it takes string[] args as parameter so that you can pass the program command line arguments
3- No globals
4- Command line arguments will be in the array, you can then foreach around them (Or use a for loop) to extract them
5- You can use GetCommandLineArgs() to get the array we talked about in 4, this method is static, you can learn what static is later

Will add things here as suitable as i go.

Go to File -> New -> Project

Chose Console Application from the icons that appear

Name your project HelloWorld

—-

You will see MSVS creating a new file for you named “Program.cs”, and in that file you should see something like.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace HelloWorld
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
        }
    }
}

Already we have a namespace (Same as project name), a Program Class,
and a program entry point that is always named Main.

So, Add the following line to your Main (Between the currly brackets)

Console.WriteLine(“HelloWorld”);
Console.ReadLine();

Now go to the build menu, and then to Build Solution

Now navigate to your Documents directory, In my case on Windows Vista it is
C:\Users\yazeed\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\HelloWorld\HelloWorld\bin\Debug

and double click HelloWorld.exe

bravo, you are done with your first C# program….

A Windows PC

The .NET package (Comes with Vista pre-installed, Need to install on XP)

The Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, free or pro, up to you.

A background in programming

Time, pleanty of time.

You can run the compiler from the command line, So assuming you have a very simple program in myprog.cs and you want to compile it with the command line compiler, you can compile it at the command line like this.

csc /target:exe myprog.cs

there are pleanty of compiler flags and you even need to include the names of the files you want to make use of in your program, so why not skip this one and use the Microsoft IDE.

i will come back here and give you all the command line arguments and everything some time later, for now i am not using this, it involves more typing than the progam itself.

All this talk about “code once deploy anywhere” is rubbish… if you have written software for a Windows PC, chances are you will find some incompatibilities with Mono and even with the compact framework, So, no, its a pile of rubbish, if someone in defense tells you that it needs minor adjustment’s, In many cases porting C++ software from windows to Linux has been easier, to give you a taste, download the Mono source code and then imagine that you need to make changes there not in your software.

In short, If this is one of the advantages you are looking for, cross this one out, OS-X and linux will never run Windows software like you would like them to, change is almost always a must for a sufficiently lage project.

Much of the stuff you would hope will run on Mono are patented by Microsoft, Meaning no one will ever implement them on other platforms.