What to do in my interregnum period?

[Merrion]

My contract ends Friday week and I am planning to spend a month retraining then. Question is: what to train on?

 

I have rudimentary VB.Net but no C#...should I improve the VB.Net to a higher level or should I start C# from scratch? Any ideas as to what the market (especially in Dublin) is looking for?

 

Thanks in advance,

Duncan

[Volte]

Well, C# and VB.NET go hand in hand; if you know how to use one, you basically know how to use the other. All you need to get down is the syntax. I recommend removing your attention from any specific language and learning .NET and its concepts, rather than VB.NET or C#, since the knowledge is directly transferrable to either language. I say spend a week or so getting familiar with C#'s syntax and the few language differences it does have with VB.NET, and then concentrating on .NET as a whole.

 

Also, I don't know anything about the job market, sorry.

[Derek Stone]

C# programmers earn more than VB.NET programmers. The reasons why are clear, but rather uneducated in many cases and very frustrating to those programmers who write excellently in VB.NET.

[Volte]

I should also add that I like VB.NET, but I would definately not recommend starting with it (obviously it's too late for you, Duncan, but for others...) because of Microsoft's idiotic idea of VB6 compatability. Learning with VB.NET allows you to learn incorrectly using old concepts which should now be avoided, while C# does not allow this.

[wyrd]

I'd say that VFs suggestions are good to follow. Learn the syntax of C# so you can familiarize yourself with the differences between it and VB.NET. Picking up the syntax shouldn't take long at all.. maybe a day or two at most. After that, start to learn the .NET framework. The .NET framework is huge though, so you might want to concentrating on small areas at a time.

 

I personally started with VB.NET when I transfered from VB6. I honestly didn't have much trouble leaving behind the old VB6 functions (and was actually pleased to do so). Eventually I gave C# a quick whirl and since then I have yet to even touch VB.NET. It's really more of a preference thing.

[Merrion]

Well - I have signed up to a C# course so I shall soon be troubling ye all in yet another language.....

[Nerseus]

What kind of projects did you work on in the past? Do you want to keep the same types of projects? Meaning, if they're database oriented, then I'd suggest looking at ADO.NET (assuming you want to pick up .NET) since it's changed completely since ADO 2.x. The whole concept is different and it takes some practice to get used to the new objects.

 

Of course, just how forms work has also changed. You'll have to scrap any notion of global variables and an auto-created instance of a form (like in VB6 and earlier). You can have static properties which act like globals, and your default Windows app gives you one "free" form that you don't have to create yourself, but there's no more "frmNewForm.Show()" without creating it first.

 

Then there's error handling, debugging, the new IDE and the new files (the project files, resource files, source files, etc.). That's a lot to absorb and nothing mentioned relies on one particular language - this is just the framework and VS.

 

But, the first time you fill a ComboBox with an object that has distinct properties (not just a string and an optional int in the ItemData), you'll be tickled pink.

 

As for the market, I haven't really looked around that much. I would guess that now that VB.NET has been out for a year and upgraded to .NET 1.1, some smaller to mid sized companies might start converting over to .NET where they can. But as for which language to go with, I'd guess it depends on the company. Certainly either VB.NET or C# could do the same task in the same time (given the knowledge of the programmer). There really isn't that much different other than the syntax. It's not like comparing VB6 to VC++ 6 for instance.

 

-nerseus