Any tutorials or books that teach C# the way I learned java (commandline, without intelliSense or VS)?

Question

I'm a good java programmer and want to learn C# (seems fun, delegates, linq, lambda expressions, access to native dlls and unmanged code etc).

Every tutorial, book seems to teach C# with Visual Studio. But at the learning state I want to write everything manually without intelliSense or project/solution etc and compile it at command prompt, the way anyone learns java.

Is there a good resource or book that teaches C# and .net this way?

Answer 1

I admire your passion to work with low level command line utilities, but it's not the practical approach to .NET development. You can still pick up C# by working with the high level IDE, which is why "every" book out there is going to assume such. The bottom line is, if you ever want to become a .NET dev, you'll have to know tools like Visual Studio and more than likely ReSharper in order to be of any significant value. I'm not being a condescending pessimist here. Just letting you know that what you desire is going to have to be pursued at a more personal/individual level as opposed to being conveniently learned in a book.

Answer 2

In German, there are some interesting books to find here: http://openbook.galileocomputing.de which focus on the language, not the IDE. You will probably prefer native english sources over automatic translations, maybe this can be useful (not really exotic, but why not, if it fits your needs): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/67ef8sbd.aspx

Answer 3

While I have never doen it this way, there are a number of articles about using the command line to work with the .net framework. I know it is doable, as one of the earlier books I read gave a breif introduction to creating your typical "hello world" program using the command line.

THIS article provides some of the essentials. Further, I KNOW there are command line utilities for compiling and such - you will have to do some exploring via MSDN and Google.

Having grown up in the new, warm-and-fuzzy age of helpful IDE's, I have never done any of that (and there are times when I wish I had). In fact, I am learning Java now, and even for that, I have the Eclipse IDE. Not as helpful as what VS provides, but nonetheless . . .

Of course, one can always type the code into a text editor "off-line" so-to-speak, and then compile the text files via the command line. This will spare you the pain of intellisense, live compiler warnings, and such . . . ;-)

Answer 4

You should consider Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform by Andrew Troelsen.

Chapter 2 explains building C# applications from the comand line using csc.exe. You'll get 9 pages explaining this, which is a bargan for £34!

It's mostly therory rather than code examples to work though. So you can choose to try out your ideas in notepad or whereever you like. I think Troelsen went to some effort to not assume everyone uses Visual Studio. There's even a chapter in the appendix for working with Mono.

Also, this book is awesome, spans the whole width of C# you are ever likely to need in your work, and has had the largest single possitive effect on my programming skills.