Know VBA - want to learn C#

rgmmg

I work in Finance and did a business degree c. 15 years ago (hard to believe )! Over the years, I learned VBA (would say I'm at a very good level), APIs of financial vendors (Reuters/Bloomberg etc) and some SQL (can query anyway).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I'd like to learn C# and was wondering what might be the best way for me to learn (work do not allow our team to use anything other than VBA unfortunately) given my background. Has anyone any experience making a similar transition? Thanks.

srsly78

Download and install Visual Studio Express (free). Then follow some guides on youtube or whatever.

Learning .NET is actually what you are after, so you could also try VB.Net as a stepping stone (very similar to what you are used to). .NET is the framework, c# is the language. Learning the language is pretty simple, learning the framework takes time - but will be the same whether you call it from VB or from C#.

I also work in finance, and C# is heavily used as I'm sure you know. Especially worth learning is c#/excel integration via XLL wrappers - this is a bit advanced (messy) tho.

Brussels Sprout

srsly78 wrote: »

I also work in finance, and C# is heavily used as I'm sure you know.

Wow really? I was under the (clearly completely wrong) impression that people only used VB, Java, C, C++ and some legacy languages in finance.

Would it be a big transition to go from using C# for making web applications (ASP.NET MVC) to using it for financial applications?

srsly78

Well yeah pretty much everything is used in finance - it's a broad area. I can only speak from my own personal experience (c++ dev working for consultancy working for large fx broker), so don't take it as gospel or anything.

Microsoft is definitely dominant on the desktop, so excel/vba/c# is all good stuff for this. Guys that are ninjas with excel/vba can make serious money, this has to be coupled with some domain knowledge tho - meaning bonds/swaps/derivatives etc etc.

Conversely linux and java etc are dominant on the backend stuff - so lots of work here as well.

Relevant to you is web development, which I actually know **** all about :pac: There are lots of jobs using web technologies in finance (both the microsoft kind like asp.net/WCF and other kinds). C# in finance looks exactly the same as C# in any other industry so don't worry about it.

The stuff I see getting used is desktop C# WPF. They tried Silverlight recently but that didn't work out so good, but didn't want those millions anyway.

FSL

If you can actually programme then the language is virtually irrelevant. Yes there are certain tasks which are more easily performed in language A rather than language B. However unless you need to resort to machine language to interface with a particular device or speed of execution is vital the language doesn't matter.

Brussels Sprout

FSL wrote: »

If you can actually programme then the language is virtually irrelevant.

This is a fairly general statement. Could you break it down a bit? A lot of programming seems to be learning all of the libraries and frameworks that go with a language. Are you referring more to language agnostic areas such as having a strong grasp of the fundamentals and say design patterns for example?