Lost in .Net SDK with C# due finding the documentation

Question

Hi!

Is there anything smart and helpful, that makes you able to search through the Microsoft .Net documentations (in Visual Studio 2008))? Before you mention Google: before you can search through that stuff with Google you have to know what you're searching for.

Let's say you don't know exactly what to look for and you insert ".Net C# String operations"... well... ;).

What I'm looking for is some small beginner-friendly stuff, just essentials. Not the huge thing for the professionals, because I think MS targets these people. And just those.

Thanks, fnush

Answer 1

It's far simpler to search for API calls once you have some idea of the operation you'd like to perform. The more general your query, the more general and varied the answers that you'll get back.

In your case you're looking for an introduction to C#, so try searching that in Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=Intro+to+C%23

That should bring you some documentation from the Interwebs which will provide you a decent intro to C#.

Answer 2

The primary documentation source for the .NET Framework is the MSDN, and it is very exhaustive.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

You would find here standard API documentation, but also a lot more: overviews, principles, guidelines, tips, etc. I just searched for "C# string operations" and get the following result:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228362.aspx

That seems to be a pretty high level guide of the way strings works and can be handled in the framework.

Answer 3

If you are a beginner I would suggest you pick up a book on C# to help you get started. This will be much easier than using the MSDN documentation as your base.

There have been lots of questions on SO about which books to read, so it should be easy to find one that suits you.

Answer 4

It had to happen at some point!

This site was set up as a reaction to the fact that people find all their information online these days, instead of reading books.

And now fnush is asking for some new way of getting information, where it's organised into a kind of easy-to-digest, ordered sequence so a beginner can start at the beginning and grow their knowledge of the subject without having to know what to search for next.

Maybe books are going to make a comeback after all! :)

Answer 5

I find it helpful to launch the offline MSDN library separately rather than have it appear within Visual Studio. This makes it easier to browse at a decent size without interfering with your actual coding window - and often I'll look up documentation without having Visual Studio open at all.

I usually use the Index pane on the left - then if I need to know about what's in a particular namespace or type, I can just start typing the name. Of course, that only works if you know which namespace to look for: so I would thoroughly recommend taking half an hour to just browse the most important namespaces to get a feeling for them. In particular, have an idea of what's in:

• System
• System.IO
• System.Collections
• System.Collections.Generic
• System.Linq
• System.Diagnostics
• System.Net
• System.Xml
• System.ComponentModel
• System.Data
• For web UI:
  • System.Web.UI
  • System.Web.UI.WebControls
• For Windows Forms:
  • System.Windows.Forms
  • System.Drawing
• For WPF:
  • System.Windows
  • System.Media

You don't need to really learn anything there by rote - just try to get the gist of what's where, so you know where to look later.

I also find that when searching the web, including site:msdn.microsoft.com helps a lot. Of course there's plenty of great non-MSDN content too, but it's nice to be able to filter it sometimes.

Answer 6

Mhh, is there any option to extract parts of the documentations for offline use:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/aa336803.aspx

Seems as it was possible once (http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/archive/2007/04/28/take-parts-of-the-msdn-library-offline-with-packagethis.aspx) but due changes in the MSDN sites not any more.

Extracting it could make searching much more effective ;)

Answer 7

You can also try http://www.searchdotnet.com it's a customized google search that includes only relevant .NET sites.