This third week of the boot camp was all about learning C#. This means writing a lot of console apps and getting familiar with the standard classes in the .NET framework.

In the C# week, students devote a significant amount of time learning how to work with the collection classes such as the List<T> and Dictionary<T> classes. They’ll need to be super comfortable with these classes when they start working with the Entity Framework because they will need these collections to represent database data.

We also spend time discussing the distinction between value types/reference types and the distinction between passing by value/passing by reference. The best explanation of these distinctions that I have found is in Jon Skeet’s book C# in Depth. Jon also has a nice summary of these distinctions here:

http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/parameters.html

Students also go over the basics of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) a second time. Because of the similarities between C# and TypeScript, the discussion of OOP during C# week is very similar to the discussion of OOP during JavaScript week. Students learn how to work with inheritance and interfaces. They learn how to implement overloading, when to use fields versus properties, and learn how to use different access modifiers.

Next Week

The goal of C# week is to get students ready to start building apps by using the ASP.NET Web API. Students need to learn C# to build the server-side portion of their web applications. This camp focuses on building the front-end by using AngularJS+TypeScript and the back-end by using ASP.NET Web API+C#. This is my recommended way of building Web applications when using the Microsoft stack of technologies.

One advantage of this overall approach is that working with TypeScript/ECMAScript 2015 is so similar to working with C#. The same general programming concepts are shared between TypeScript/ECMAScript and C#.

Student State of Mind

This is a tough boot camp. We already have seen some students break into tears. We’ve needed to reassure several students that, if they continue to work hard, that they will make it through the program.

Sometimes it takes a while for a student’s confidence to catch up to their abilities. I always find it funny when we ask a student to start programming in front of the class, and the student starts typing the right code, but then the student stops and announces that he or she doesn’t know how to write the code. If the student just let their fingers keep typing then the student would have been successful. Moments later, the student is typing again and getting it right.

I have confidence in all of the students in this camp. They are clearly working very long hours and many of them are making good progress on their individual projects.

Learn More

If you want to sign up for our next boot camp in Seattle then register here.