Maega: The world is full of people who need help. Disregarding them, although not very effective in making them quit, does seem to be the best option, though .

Edward Ropple: Basic is good for teaching people the basics of programming, and thus, learning it in order to teach people might be helpfull .

Arild Fines:
"Are there free linux compilers for C# that I could download?"
"Yes"
Don''t supposed you could spare a link?

"Garbage collection?!?"
"Yup, like any other civilized language" (and GC related comments)
Let me interpret correctly:

1) returning items such as classes would be easier legally than in C++, as things are done from the heap.
2) Heap allocation is faster because it does memory allocation for you, in effect.
3) That is useful in cases where I am not writing my own memory manager for a specific task (aka, projects which need speed, but also need to stay fairly general to speed improvements).

Given the scenario where I am writing a game, with it''s own fast memory manager (with pre-allocated memory), this would not be of help to me. Also, in the given scenario, would I be able to overload new/delete or the like to achieve the desired result?

This would be the primary background that I am comming from. I understand, however, that GC would/will be usefull to lower end games/projects.

GoofProg: Me too .

JuNC: Don''t give them any ideas.

Hi,

My answer to the first question is yes.
I''m a C++ programmer, but i''ve started to learn C#,
and i find it very enjoyable and easy to work with.

From what i understand, C# was, primarly made to be used as the
primary language to develop for the .NET framework ( someone correct me if im wrong here)

And yes, you get a free compiler with .NET framework, which
you can download from MS site.

As to the differences between C# and C++, i dont know a heck of alot about it, but
one of the larger ones, is that C# is a PURE OO languages,
whereas, C++ is a PROCEDURAL language, with OO extensions.

In short, you should definatly learn it. C# , in my oppionion,
is here to stay. That means that if you want to work professionaly as a programmer,
you will most likely end up in a situation where it''s required of you to know it.

Well, thats all from me at the moment
I hope this was of some help to you.

Good luck my friend!

I''ll throw in my 2 cents..

If you already know C++ or Java, then C# takes about an hour to learn (5 minutes for syntax, 55 minutes to browse through the framework and get a general understanding of what''s in it).

So.. IMO, why not learn it? It certainly doesn''t hurt.

Linux compiler can be found here;
www.go-mono.org

Windows compiler can be found here;
www.microsoft.com/net/

There''s also a free IDE for Windows called SharpDevelop (or something like that). I don''t have a link on hand, so search google.

I really don''t like Java much at all. Is it that close to Java?

As I see it, C# is something between C++ and Java. Now, why learn a language that looks like Java but lacks most of the benefits of Java and is less advanced then C++?

C# has pointer support, unlike Java.
-N

I don''t think it''s been ported to linux (yet) but Sharp Develop is a pretty nice C# IDE and can be found here: http://www.icsharpcode.net -- a couple of other nice beenfits of it, is that it''s written in C# itself, and it''s open source.

The C# compiler itself comes with the .NET framework, which you have to install whether you use Sharp Develop or Visual Studio.NET or whatever. I''d imagine microsoft.com/net/ would be the place to pick that up, as the previous posted mentioned.

If you''re wanting to go the free route and wanting to develop ASP.NET (i.e. web database) applications and services, you should go to www.asp.net and download WebMatrix. It''s pretty nice. SharpDevelop, as nice as it is, isn''t officially supporting asp.net stuff yet.

Hope all this info helps.

-Ascent