I’m sure you read the title for this article and asked yourself “what does C# have to do with internet marketing and SEO?” Well, it doesn’t really; not directly anyways. However, a lot of the secrets I’ll be explaining on this site involve desktop applications for automation & other useful tasks and I’ll be creating the majority of those tools using C#. So, if you want to keep up, you’ll need to learn some C#. Now, I’m not going to jump into teaching you C# in this article. But, I do at least want to point you toward some useful resources so that you’ll have a place to start.
One thing you need to get started is the Microsoft .NET runtime. A lot of programmers think that C# is a weak language and that the .NET framework is a waste of time. Well, I can personally vouche for both. I am an advanced programmer in pretty much every language out there, but I find that C# is probably the easiest to grasp and can prove to be a very powerful tool with very minimum effort. In fact, the .NET framework provides you with a ton of interoperability tools, automation utilities, and other mechanics that would normally take you days to program from scratch. It is a comprehensive package that gives you everything you need right out-of-the-box.
Begin your C# & .NET programming career by downloading the .NET framework from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569263.aspx and clicking the “Install it now” button. Once you have the .NET framework installed, you can grab yourself a free copy of Visual Studio Express from http://www.microsoft.com/express/Windows/. Yes, you read that correctly. I said FREE!!! I think that Microsoft made a good move by providing their Visual Studio IDE available to developers at the low cost of FREE!!! This makes it a lot easier for developers to get a feel for the .NET framework and to make the move toward programming using the C# language. As of the writing of this article, I am using Visual C# Express 2010. The download link above also provides links for downloading the Visual Basic and Visual C++ IDEs. Although those are some great tools as well, you won’t be needing those for any of the tutorials located on this site as I do all my programming in Visual C#.
After you’ve downloaded and installed the .NET framework and Visual C# Express IDE, checkout some of the example projects found on the Microsoft website as well as thousands of other awesome projects found on the web. If you’ve ever done any Java development, C# will come as a breeze as I found that these 2 languages are extremely close in nature with a few syntactical differences here and there. Plus, another cool thing about using C# is that you can also use it for developing video games for both Windows as well as the Xbox 360 using the XNA framework also provided by Microsoft. If you’re interested in doing any video game development using the XNA framework, you’ll probably find my XNA website called Everyday XNA (http://www.everydayxna.com) a good start as it has several example projects, how-to’s, and sample code to get you started.
As for some of the tools I’ll be teaching you on this website, you can be expecting to learn how to create RSS readers, screen scrapers, & even website submitters. I’ll walk you through everything you need to know to create a C# project. Once we’re done learning how to create a few basic tools, I’ll show you how to use those tools for making money on the web. In fact, some of the tools I’ll be sharing with you can be ran on auto-pilot. That means you can just sit back, let the tools run, and collect some pay dirt. But, for now, you need to get your feet wet with C# and the .NET framework by learning the basics.
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