The chapters in this module of the book

• Chapter 1, Introduction to Computers, the Internet and Visual C#

• Chapter 2, Introduction to Visual Studio and Visual Programming

introduce hardware and software fundamentals, Microsoft’s .NET platform and Visual Programming. The vast majority of the book’s examples will run on Windows 7, 8 and 10 using the Visual Studio 2015 Community edition with which we test-drive a fun Painter app in Section 1.12. Chapter 1’s introduction to object-oriented programming defines key terminology and discusses important concepts on which the rest of the book depends.

The chapters in this module of the book

• Chapter 3, Introduction to C# App Programming

• Chapter 4, Introduction to Classes, Objects, Methods and Strings

• Chapter 5, Algorithm Development and Control Statements: Part 1

• Chapter 6, Control Statements: Part 2

• Chapter 7, Methods: A Deeper Look

• Chapter 8, Arrays; Introduction to Exception Handling

present rich coverage of C# programming fundamentals (data types, operators, control statements, methods and arrays) and introduce object-oriented programming through a series of case studies. These chapters should be covered in order. Chapters 5 and 6 present a friendly treatment of control statements and problem solving. Chapters 7 and 8 present rich treatments of methods and arrays, respectively. Chapter 8 briefly introduces exception handling with an example that demonstrates attempting to access an element outside an array’s bounds.

The chapters in this module of the book

• Chapter 9, Introduction to LINQ and the List Collection

• Chapter 10, Classes and Objects: A Deeper Look

• Chapter 11, Object-Oriented Programming: Inheritance

• Chapter 12, OOP: Polymorphism and Interfaces

• Chapter 13, Exception Handling: A Deeper Look

provide a deeper look at object-oriented programming, including classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces and exception handling. An optional online two-chapter case study on designing and implementing the object-oriented software for a simple ATM is described later in this preface.

Chapter 9 introduces Microsoft’s Language Integrated Query (LINQ) technology, which provides a uniform syntax for manipulating data from various data sources, such as arrays, collections and, as you’ll see in later chapters, databases and XML. Chapter 9 is intentionally simple and brief to encourage instructors to begin covering LINQ technology early. Section 9.4 introduces the List collection, which we use in Chapter 12. Later in the book, we take a deeper look at LINQ, using LINQ to Entities (for querying databases) and LINQ to XML. Chapter 9’s LINQ coverage can be deferred if you’re in a course which either skips LINQ or defers coverage until later in the book—it’s required for one example in Chapter 17 (Fig. 17.6) and many of the later chapters starting with Chapter 22, Databases and LINQ.

The chapters in this module of the book

• Chapter 14, Graphical User Interfaces with Windows Forms: Part 1

• Chapter 15, Graphical User Interfaces with Windows Forms: Part 2

present a detailed introduction to building GUIs using Windows Forms—instructors teaching Visual C# still largely prefer Windows Forms for their classes. Many of the examples in GUI Chapters 14–15 can be presented after Chapter 4. We also use Windows Forms GUIs in several other print and online chapters.

There are two other GUI technologies in Windows—Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). We provide optional online treatments of both.3

The chapters in this module of the book

• Chapter 16, Strings and Characters: A Deeper Look

• Chapter 17, Files and Streams

present string processing and file processing, respectively. We introduce strings beginning in Chapter 4 and use them throughout the book. Chapter 16 investigates strings in more detail. Most of Chapter 16’s examples can be presented at any point after Chapter 4. Chapter 17 introduces text-file processing and object-serialization for inputting and outputting entire objects. Chapter 17 requires Windows Forms concepts presented in Chapter 14.

The chapters in this module of the book:

• Chapter 18, Searching and Sorting

• Chapter 19, Custom Linked Data Structures

• Chapter 20, Generics

• Chapter 21, Generic Collections; Functional Programming with LINQ/PLINQ

introduce searching, sorting and data structures. Most C# programmers should use .NET’s built-in searching, sorting and generic collections (prepackaged data structures) capabilities, which are discussed in Chapter 21. For instructors who wish to present how to implement customized searching, sorting and data structures capabilities, we provide Chapters 18–20, which require the concepts presented in Chapters 3–8 and 10–13. Chapter 18 presents several searching and sorting algorithms and uses Big O notation to help you compare how hard each algorithm works to do its job—the code examples use especially visual outputs to show how the algorithms work. In Chapter 19, we show how to implement your own custom data structures, including lists, stacks, queues and binary trees. The data structures in Chapter 19 store references to objects. Chapter 20 introduces C# generics and demonstrates how to create type-safe generic methods and a type-safe generic stack data structure.

In addition to generic collections, Chapter 21 now introduces functional programming, showing how to use it with LINQ to Objects to write code more concisely and with fewer bugs than programs written using previous techniques. In Section 21.12, with one additional method call, we’ll demonstrate how PLINQ (Parallel LINQ) can improve LINQ to Objects performance substantially on multicore systems. The chapter’s exercises also ask you to reimplement earlier examples using functional-programming techniques.

The chapter in this module

• Chapter 22, Databases and LINQ

presents a novice-friendly introduction to database programming with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ to Entities and Microsoft’s free version of SQL Server that’s installed with the Visual Studio 2015 Community edition. The chapter’s examples require C#, object-oriented programming and Windows Forms concepts presented in Chapters 3–14. Several online chapters require the techniques presented in this chapter.

The chapter in this module

• Chapter 23, Asynchronous Programming with async and await

shows how to take advantage of multicore architectures by writing applications that can process tasks asynchronously, which can improve app performance and GUI responsiveness in apps with long-running or compute-intensive tasks. The async modifier and await operator greatly simplify asynchronous programming, reduce errors and enable your apps to take advantage of the processing power in today’s multicore computers, smartphones and tablets. In this edition, we added a case study that uses the Task Parallel Library (TPL), async and await in a GUI app—we keep a progress bar moving along in the GUI thread in parallel with a lengthy, compute-intensive calculation in another thread.

Microsoft’s .NET server-side technology, ASP.NET, enables you to create robust, scalable web-based apps. You’ll build several apps, including a web-based guestbook that uses ASP.NET and the ADO .NET Entity Framework to store data in a database and display data in a web page.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is pervasive in the software-development industry, e-business and throughout the .NET platform. It’s used in most of this book’s online topics. XML is required to understand XAML—a Microsoft XML vocabulary that’s used to describe graphical user interfaces, graphics and multimedia for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) GUI, graphics and multimedia apps, Windows 10 Mobile apps and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps. We present XML fundamentals, then discuss LINQ to XML, which allows you to query XML content using LINQ syntax.

The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is designed to provide a common platform and user experience across all Windows devices, including personal computers, smartphones, tablets, Xbox and even Microsoft’s new HoloLens virtual reality and augmented reality holographic headset—all using nearly identical code. We present GUI, graphics and multimedia apps, and demonstrate them on both personal computers and the smartphone emulator that comes with Visual Studio 2015 Community edition.

Web services enable you to package app functionality in a manner that turns the web into a library of reusable services. We include a case study on building a math question generator web service that’s called by a math tutor app.

Microsoft Azure’s web services enable you to develop, manage and distribute your apps in “the cloud.” We’ll demonstrate how to use Azure web services to store an app’s data online.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)—created after Windows Forms and before UWP—is another Microsoft technology for building robust GUI, graphics and multimedia desktop apps. WPF provides you with complete control over all aspects of a GUI’s look-and-feel and includes multimedia capabilities that are not available in Windows Forms. We discuss WPF in the context of a painting app, a text editor, a color chooser, a book-cover viewer, a television video player, various animations, and speech synthesis and recognition apps.

We’re moving away from WPF in favor of UWP for creating apps that can run on desktop, mobile and other Windows devices. For this reason, the WPF introduction is provided as is from the previous edition—we will no longer evolve this material.

The UML™ (Unified Modeling Language™) is the industry-standard graphical language for visually modeling object-oriented systems. We introduce the UML in the early chapters and provide an optional online object-oriented design case study in which we use the UML to design and implement the software for a simple ATM. We analyze a typical requirements document that specifies the details of the system to be built. We determine the classes needed to implement that system, the attributes the classes need to have, the behaviors the classes’ methods need to exhibit and we specify how the classes must interact with one another to meet the system requirements. From the design, we produce a complete working C# implementation. Students often report a “light bulb moment”—the case study helps them “tie it all together” and truly understand object orientation.

The book is loaded with “live-code” examples—most new concepts are presented in the context of complete working Visual C# apps, followed by one or more executions showing program inputs and outputs. In the few cases where we show a code snippet, to ensure correctness first we tested it in a complete working program then copied the code from the program and pasted it into the book.

For readability, we syntax shade the code, similar to the way Visual Studio colors the code. Our syntax-shading conventions are:

comments appear like this
keywords appear like this
constants and literal values appear like this
all other code appears in black

We emphasize key code segments by placing them in gray rectangles.

We place the key terms and the index’s page reference for each defining occurrence in colored bold text for easy reference. We show on-screen components in the bold Helvetica font (for example, the File menu) and Visual C# program text in the Lucida font (for example, int count = 5;). We use italics for emphasis.

The chapter objectives preview the topics covered in the chapter.

We include programming tips to help you focus on important aspects of program development. These tips and practices represent the best we’ve gleaned from a combined nine decades of programming and teaching experience.

We present a detailed bullet-list summary of each chapter.

We include an alphabetized list of the important terms defined in each chapter.

We’ve included an extensive index for reference. Defining occurrences of key terms in the index are highlighted with a colored bold page number. The printed book index covers only the printed material. The online index includes the content from the printed book and the online content.