Question Where to start learning to use the Visual Studio IDE

[vowew]

Hi,

I am 51 years old.

This is my first time here, and English is not my native language, so please be easy with an older man.

I have worked as an accountant for 24 years in accounting, finance, budgeting, financial modeling, etc.

All I know is Excel, the Microsoft Excel.

I never thought about learning to program in my entire life.

I recently started using VBA or Macros in Excel, which I found very interesting. I like it a lot.

I started to google many things, and my searches led me to conclude that learning to program is the most recommended advice for dealing with different stuff.

But VBA is not the way to go beyond Microsoft Office programming, so I googled more and concluded that C Sharp is the language that Microsoft supports and works with.

I googled more again for C Sharp and found that Visual Studio (not the code version) is the software to be used.

I found the free version (the community one) and downloaded it, choosing all workloads or workspaces.

I am interested in visual studio and programming like a kid with a new toy, but I feel lost with this vast software.

I am not after money or a job, as my daily job pays my bills, but I like learning and programming.

I am an old-school learner who likes books and self-study, and I have taught myself everything since graduation.

So, from your experience, what is the right way to start learning Visual Studio? Most of my searches involved a lot of advice regarding being productive when learning to program.

 

[Skydiver]

I've not checked to see if there are newer editions of "Programming Windows" by Charles Petzold, but the old edition of the book that did things in C# and tackled WinForms and WPF back in the early 2000's was actually a pretty good introduction to the VS IDE on top of teaching how to program for Windows. Alas, the IDE has changed quite a bit since then.

Hopefully someone can suggest a more recent book. @kareninstructor : do you have any suggestions?

 

[kareninstructor]

For learning C#, check out the following book C# 12 and .NET 8 – Modern Cross-Platform which I have no read but was highly recommended by a Milan Jovanovic who I know from Twitter. Another resource is Foundational C# with Microsoft.

There are really no books on learning Visual Studio but check out Getting started with Visual Studio IDE by Microsoft and if you want online tutorials, check out Pluralsight, $29 per month with a free trial period.

 

[Simple Samples]

Microsoft does provide many tutorials but they might be difficult to find. The following might help.

• What is the Visual Studio IDE? (probably just go to Get started)
• C# development with Visual Studio - Visual Studio (Windows) | Microsoft Learn
• .NET Tutorials | Microsoft Learn

There might be some duplication in those. Something I found that probably helps is Introduction to projects and solutions - Visual Studio (Windows) | Microsoft Learn. For a beginner it might be confusing what a solution is but actually they are more like workspaces than anything else. As a beginner you will likely have just one project in your solutions and all projects will be in a solution.

If you prefer videos then YouTube has many videos. I have never found a YouTube video about programming that helps me but as a beginner a video might help.

I think most beginner books about C# will also introduce an IDE but probably you need to ensure that it is not Visual Studio Code. I agree that Visual Studio is the better choice.

 

[cjard]

Decide on a problem to solve, something that interests you from the field of accounting perhaps, and tell us about it. We can give skeleton instructions for you to make a start with. Personally I would look for a way to solve it with a Windows Forms project as they're probably the easiest way to start writing a program that "looks like something" and "does something" - pretty much everything else is incredibly tedious/uphill challenge because of the lack of visual design tools