Quote:Original post by Cgr
3. Seems my lack of C# resources are limited. What sites, software, forums, chats have you found to be useful in your journey through programming?

IRQ channels seem to be one of the best resources. And try looking around Microsoft and MSDN, they've been plugging the language like hell since XNA's release, and seem to have a lot of resources and tutorials.

Quote:Original post by Cgr
1. Can anyone give me some examples of commercial games written in C#? I am tired of being told contradictory information whether C# is a suitable game development language or not. I'd like to see proof. Don't list any games that just used C# for scripting/tools, though.

To my knowledge there are none. C# is a relatively young language and commercial games take a while to develop. Plus the game industry tends to be a little slow moving in these sort of regards.

Not that it doesn't make C# suitable now but it didn't the 3-5 years ago it would've needed to be in order to be used in a shipping game. It still sort of not suitable for certain consoles. Since you're not a professional developer on a PS3, you needn't worry about it.

Quote:
2. I've been programming C# for a few years, yet I still feel like a beginner. Schooling is not an option for me, so what other ways can I teach myself C#? I've been given the advice "learn to program by programming", and I'm not having good results as of yet. I don't know what 'parts' of the language I need to learn in order to implement the features that I want.

You need to know all the parts... I mean you won't need to know the entirety of the standard library, but the language syntax isn't particularly deep or complex. You'll need to know, or at least recognize all of the syntax so that you can progress onto parts of the standard library and learning programming proper.

That's mostly the key; to get the language and library known well enough to focus entirely on programming rather than syntax or "what class does X?".

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3. Seems my lack of C# resources are limited. What sites, software, forums, chats have you found to be useful in your journey through programming?

I had a relatively firm grasp on programming before C#. 'Programming C#' by Liberty was the only book I used. It is good, though perhaps not beginner oriented. MSDN library docs are of course essential.

Once you get the language down well enough to make hangman and perhaps a few things slightly more complex, a design book akin to this will be helpful.

1. Arena Wars was written in C# using managed DX 1.1.
That's the only reason Microsoft even supported managed directx as long as they did from what I heard since someone did manage to put out a commerical game using it!
Nasa World Wind is another powerful program, though not a game, that was also written in C#/managed DX.

2.Try writing small useful programs for yourself whenever you get a chance.
That'll give you an idea of what areas you need to work on. For example if you are writing a simple GUI text editor do you know how to use the open,save,browse,etc dialog controls to open/save text files? If so can you do creating the controls in code and not relying on the toolbox?
I've personally read 1/2 dozen C# books and it's not until I try writing programs like I mentioned above for myself that I realize how little I really learned!
And how much I still need. One way of learning is repetition so if you write enough programs it will get easier since you will start to see the same patterns over and over.

3. If you got access to the NET your resources are pretty much unlimited. The downside is filtering out the good from the bad and not wasting too much time hanging out and talking about programming instead of actually doing it!
This site we are posting on is the most useful since there are so many programmers here that have seen it done it before that can help out and usually do.