How to Get Started with C # in Visual Studio Code! Full Tutorial for Beginners

what's going on guys welcome back to the channel and today's video is going to be an absolute beginner crash course in c-sharp [Music] so to get started with c-sharp you're going to want to install an ide in integrated development environment and the one i'll be using for this tutorial series and i really recommend this one is microsoft visual studio to get to it just google visual studio download take the link that'll take you to microsoft.com and for this installation you can either download visual studio make sure you grab community edition so you don't have to pay for it it's totally free or you can just hit this download visual studio with net if you do do the community download then there's going to be a whole bunch of options and you have to select some things to make sure you get the right type after you download visual studio it's going to ask you what kind of install you want and just make sure you select the one that says dotnet framework because that's what we'll be using for c-sharp so once you have it downloaded and installed you're gonna um click on visual studio to get to open in the just create a new project it gives you all these options because visual studio has like a hundred gigabytes worth of plugins and different applications you can run through it but what we're going to be using is console app with net framework so there are there are so many options that there's actually even two called console application so make sure you grab the one with net framework so that you can follow along in this tutorial so hit next give it a name we'll call this c sharp crash course um call it whatever you want and just hit create and what you're going to notice once it loads up is there's a little bit of pre-populated code and you're going to see it says using system and then a whole bunch of add-ins after that don't worry about these too much they're essentially modules accessing things inside of your computer so that the code can run just leave it as is it needs to be there but you don't really need to know what it means for this tutorial and then kind of the same with this solution explorer over on the right there's a whole bunch of things in there properties references as we get more into c-sharp we'll talk about what a lot of those do but all you really need to recognize for today is this c-sharp file is given the same name you just gave your project and you'll notice over here on the left your namespace is also the name of the project you just gave it and this auto-populated class is really just a location to put functional code inside of it we'll really nail down a description as we get more into the tutorials but i just want to get you guys programming as fast as possible and then this static void main is a method and a function where you're going to put code as well but all you really need to know for now is every time there's an open and closed curly brackets that's essentially the start of and end of a code module and for getting started you want to just put all of the functional code inside of your main function you'll notice the indentation is going to be pretty much automatic for you so you don't have to worry about syntax just make sure it's inside the curly brackets underneath static void main and we'll write all of our code uh for this tutorial inside of main okay so the very first thing i want to do is just get something displayed on the console um if this is the first programming language that you've ever seen and somehow the first tutorial that you've ever watched welcome and uh be sure to like and subscribe for more content but um you're probably familiar with the fact the first program that people always write is basically a hello world program where they just print hello world onto the screen that's kind of boring so we'll instead of writing hello world we'll write like what is freaking up because that's way cooler but i want to talk about this line of code because there's a few things going on here c-sharp specific that we should really discuss so console is how you address the window that's going to pop up it's the console is sort of referred to as like the command window if you're completely unfamiliar with computers a console window is basically the lowest level just simple display that you can get out of your computer there's not a lot going on it's black and white typically it's just plain text and so console.writeline is all you need to put in to get something to display on a window when you run your program but what you'll see so console.writeline and then open parentheses close parentheses and then any text that you put inside of quotation marks is going to display on the screen and then make sure anytime you have a line so this is basically like a a little executable it's an instruction anytime you want to end an instruction you need to make sure you put a semicolon at the end of the line you're going to get errors if you don't put those in c sharp in in visual studio is pretty good about helping you debug and troubleshoot errors so if you forget a semicolon a lot of times you'll get a little error pop-up that says like semicolon expected you're going to forget about semicolons people who've been programming for years forget semicolons so don't worry about it just try to keep that in mind but so this is all we need to display something on the screen but what you'll see if i go up here and i hit start and it's going to do something called compiling which is making sure your code is valid and that's going to run but what you saw there maybe you didn't the the console pops up just for like one scan of the computer and then it goes away right away because it's executing the code and then it's it as far as it can tell it's done so what we need to do is just put kind of a break in this code by adding console.read and then we'll just do open and close parentheses and then semicolon and now when we run this i'll talk a little bit about what that does okay we get our text what is freaking up that's sweet um so that's cool that's basically our hello world program and what it's doing right now you can see the blinking inside of our console window it's waiting for some sort of text so i type whatever in here and then when i hit enter it's gonna execute and then read that line and that's when the window closes so we used this read line to add a break to the programming but this is super useful um anytime you want to slow down a program and understand where it is at the moment you just hit um you put a console.readline in there and that'll put a break in your programming okay so that's sweet that's your first function you've downloaded visual studio and gotten programming in like five minutes so great job let's go to the next thing let's start doing something kind of cool a lot of tutorials will stop right there and be like oh you learned visual studio like uh you learned c sharp um let's actually do something um useful so i wanna talk real quick i'm going to copy this console right line and we're going to change the text but i want to talk a little bit about the order it goes in so i'm going to put like three different fruits in here so that you can see um apple banana and then orange so hopefully if you're familiar with english and how we read in um you know society we go left to right and top to bottom and that's how c executes as well so if i run this you'll see apple first banana second orange third so order matters and what i mean by that is like if i'm to gonna copy orange and move it up to the top and then i run this you're going to see orange before apple and banana now so this order is is also how it's going to execute so if you ever write code where like something happening down here needs to see something has completed up here order's really important it's going to give you an error if you try to like reference a variable that doesn't get created until later in your program that's kind of a universal truth of programming so even if you learn other languages if you learn python it's exactly the same java it doesn't matter if you try to reference a variable on a line before you have instantiated called defined whatever the verbage of that language is if you haven't created a variable you're not going to be able to use it yet so that's cool we've written multiple lines of code we've got a break in there so that we can read about it but let's let's start using variables i just referenced variables just talking about them and that's a super important thing in all programming especially c sharp to use variables is going to give you some flexibility so let's say you wanted to create a little mad libs that's your name is pete your age is 25 and then we'll say third line but next year you will be 26 okay like yeah i can enter these manually but that's not a very robust program what would be a lot better is if i had a variable for my name so we'll make to make a variable you enter the data type and we'll talk a little bit about data types in a second but name is gonna be a string so you type in the word string and then you type the name the name of your variable which in this case is going to be name and then you give it an initial value so for a string we'll say name is going to be equal to p and make sure you've got your semicolon and then we will save for age but age is going to be a whole number so that's integer which is just int in c-sharp and then we'll say age and that's equal to and you don't need quotations when you're doing integers it's going to recognize the number format okay so now instead of your name is pete we're gonna say your name is space and then we're going to use this plus sign which is um it's technically addition but in string terms this is called concatenation and so we're basically saying your name is plus and then the name of the variable we gave it so we don't have to type in the whole string name equal pete we just say name and then it's the exact same thing for age and this is one difference between like python and c sharp and c plus plus in c sharp it can concatenate a string with a uh integer or decimal value just by um it's able to convert that it's able to handle that internally if this was python you'd have to do a string conversion so that you're only dealing with strings you can leave this in here just as an integer but then this is a super cool thing now in the middle of our program we can just say age equals the previous value of age plus one and now we can say right here next year you will be plus age and this is going to get do basically exactly what we need it to do it's always going to give you the value and see i already forgot semicolon this is always going to give you a value saying next year you will be your age plus one and you could make this a new variable you could say like new age equals age plus one you'd have to do the whole gambit just like this but because order matters we can have it work both ways we can just say age equals age plus one and so this is going to tell us we're 25 and then it's going to add one to it and then next year you'll be 26. so if i go ahead and run this and you run yours um you're going to see your name is pete your age is 25 next year will be 26. okay let's do someone else let's say your name is jack and you're 27. okay so all i did was change two values and right away the whole thing updates to be correct your name's jack 27 next year will be 28 so that's the power of variables and this is kind of a silly example because there's not really a value in madlibs but in general anytime you store value in a variable it's because you want to keep using it you want to manipulate it throughout your program and it's a lot easier to store that somewhere than have to keep in mind what it was and hard code it so that's super useful that's kind of a brief introduction to variables but let's say we want this to be a little more intuitive and i don't want to have to change these values initially i want to ask the user for input because uh right now all we've all we're really doing is providing output to the system what we're going to do is make it where we ask the user for that name and for that age and this is going to be great because essentially the core of programming is get user input process the input and then display some output using the inputs that you got so we're going to do all of that inside this function in just a few minutes so instead of instead of just doing this string name equals and then just entering a value what we're gonna do is give them some instructions so we'll use this console.writeline and we'll say parentheses enter your name and we'll put that on one line and then we'll go ahead and close that semicolon and now what we're going to do is we're going to use and you've actually already seen the console.readline function because we've used it before make sure you get your indentations correct but what we do here is we say string name equals and instead of giving an initial value what we're going to do is use console.readline okay okay so this is um really cool now we're gonna say enter your name and then the little blinker the on the you know thing signifying you're entering text is just gonna sit there until the user types in their name and hits enter and we're going to take whatever the user entered and we're going to store it in a variable called name that we'll then use later on so this is an important point here read line is always going to take whatever was written in as a string so if the next thing we want to do i'm going to go ahead and copy this but we're going to change it to age so right line enter your and this time we will say age now it's still going to be int age equals but we can't just take console.readline i wish we could but we have to convert it to an integer because it's coming in as a string and that's why you're going to get like a red squiggly line if you just leave it like this because it's telling you it can't just implicitly convert string to integer it has to be told to convert it fortunately that's a super easy function in c sharp you just use convert dot and then this in particular we're going to an integer and so the the function is 2 in 32 it's 32 because of how many um booleans technically in binary that are used in an integer value you don't have to worry about that you just have to know it's 2in32 and then put that console.readline that whole block of code put it inside its own set of parentheses and now it's the user is not going to notice any difference between entering their name and entering their age it's just the code now knows to handle that as an integer and then everything else is going to work just fine so let's go ahead and run this let's say enter your name let's do pete enter your age 25 your name is pete your age is 25 next year you'll be 26. let's go ahead and close it let's run again give it some different values we're jack we're 27. your name's jack you're 27 next year it'll be 28. so just like that we've created our first program our first function our first variables everything inside of 15 minutes and hopefully you understand where all this code is coming from i know we haven't covered some of the concepts of like structure of the project structure of the file but you're already able to pull a variety of information in from users manipulate it inside of your program and then output data based on what you got so this is a crazy useful speed tutorial you learn a lot of concepts right here in 15 minutes i'll touch on one more thing before we end this initial tutorial because you've seen integers and you've seen strings and we didn't really talk a ton about them we basically just said integers are whole numbers like in age and string is any combination of text but let's just talk briefly about two things so first adding comments to code in python i just used forward slashes but there you do two backslashes and you can type whatever you want after that two forward slashes is going to mean whatever else is on that wrong on that line of code isn't going to get executed they're just notes for the programmer they live inside of the function so everything i'm about to put underneath here is just for our data type discussion it's not really useful code but this is how you do comments okay so that's a super useful general um piece about c sharp you should know and we've already seen that integers are basically any whole number like a hundred or a hundred and twenty um we've already seen that strings are basically any text so you could have names or i don't know other text or other things okay but those are probably the two most common ones you'll see but a few others that really pop up a lot in programming are a double so i'll talk briefly about there's a variety of ways to have decimal point values and they could be in double float or what's called decimal format and i'm not going to go too into each of them just know that it kind of is like how precise do you need it float technically speaking is the least precise decimal is technically the most i believe but just in general i always use double for decimal points so basically if you have a number like money like you want to be really accurate with money so someone owes you 345 dollars and 35 cents i would always put that in a double okay that's just another really common variable one that maybe you're not used to if you don't do a lot of programming or you haven't in the past is what's considered a boolean but if you think of all the scenarios in code where you have an on off or a true false yes no type scenario where you're just checking if something is or is not active this is also sometimes called discrete points or digital points um those are just all different names for it but the variable type that you're going to use the data type is boolean and so boolean which i'll say is gonna be true false can only have two values true like that or false like that and it it's a super useful thing in coding it's way easier than creating an integer and then checking every time you want to reference it if it's equal to a zero or a one or something like that or a string and checking if it's equal to the text true or the text false just use this type of variable it's super critical in programming and you're really going to want to get familiar with booleans um one more that's a little bit less common is a character and so this is like a single letter or a single number that you wanted to put into a variable of exactly space one but it could be a varying character so you could think of like a grade um like a b c d f um in the in the grade system and you actually use single quotations for these ones so you could put an a here it could be lower it could be upper it could be a number um but a character is only going to be able to house one character and if you put multiple in it's going to give you an error so that's character you won't see that one as much but it is nice to know that it's out there there are some other data types that will probably crop up as we do more and more of these tutorials but for now those are the most common ones that are going to pop up in your tutorials in your programs but in general this is really a 20-minute crash course that should give you a ton of concepts that are going to get used in c-sharp all the time i hope you found it useful if you did please consider subscribing the channel liking the video helps me out a ton if there's something specific you want to see in a future video be sure to let me know about in the comments below i'll get back to you as soon as possible and it might even make that concept into a video so thank you so much for your support good luck with your code and thanks for watching thanks bye