Welcome

Hello everyone, what better way to start the year by putting some time on sharing what experience provides us over the years of playing around with .NET framework plus C#.

Everyone is welcome to come along but content here won't be a language reference nor aimed to beginners but I will try to keep things simple so everyone can get something useful out of it. Having some depth experience with .NET already will come handy.

About me

I always thought that it all started back when I used to play around with the computer (just before windows 3.1) then a bit serious with IBM’s manual and DOS, is quite interesting how focus can change in an instant.

I remember that I wanted to install a game -Hocus Pocus- but run into an error (zipped file) and it was the first time in which I had to do such thing since it was always direct install from floppy. So I got introduced to ‘pkunzip’ -if I remember correctly- and after that I started wondering:

What else can I do?

So I jumped back into that IBM manual and worked with DOS 6, that way I mainly stayed at the console and only moved to GUI on Windows XP. Now for “programming” started with batches on DOS then Turbo-C and finally Visual Studio 6 with VB for about a year.

I have had such a peculiar experience with .NET and C#. At first I didn’t like the GUI so I stayed at the console until Windows XP was available and used it until 2010-2012, besides XP I have only used Windows 2000 Professional for administration, back then I started using CentOS -my fav distro-. This went back to back with windows administration as I used to replicated things I learnt on both, since then when I had to do something on C I would choose to do it on Linux.

Now tools for development, my all time favorite combination was Visual Studio 2012 with Windows XP and C#, this combination I used constantly up to 2020, it was the only VM I had on my MacBook 2012 to work with Windows Forms and anything related to Microsoft’s products. Since 2012 my main OS has been either macOS or fedora and used Windows when needed.

I started using .NET Core on Red Hat at first and eventually moved completely to macOS when it was supported so the key is to adjust to whatever it comes.

Update Jan 2022 Since Jan 2021 I focus almost exclusively on Apple’s ecosystem on M1 so no Windows VM for the moment, only Swift for iOS, iPadOS and macOS.

Update Jan 2023 Regarding .NET, I use it with C# as always but now in a mix with maths, physics and 3D stuff from time to time.