Greetings,

I'm a longtime Windows Perl hacker who's now learning C#. I'm hoping to find helpful resources and to get good tips from other experienced Perl programmers who have translated their Perl skills to C# and .NET Framework programming.

I write a lot of basic kinds of scripts that are mostly simple command-line utilities that operate on files—usually plain text files. Occasionally, I work with data in SQL databases. A typical script of mine uses modules like File::Glob, File::Spec, Getopt::Long, Text::CSV_XS, DateTime, DBI, DBD::ODBC, etc. Of course I use object-oriented modules, but the scripts I write are procedural with incidental sprinklings of functional (map, grep, Schwartzian transforms, etc.). I've never written a class myself. I can't imagine programming without hashes (associative arrays or dictionaries). I consider myself pretty darned adept with regular expressions, and I know a lot about Unicode. (I'm an individual member of the Unicode Consortium.) I'm also the company date, time and time zone nerd. I work primarily in the electronic discovery business.

I think the quickest way for me to learn C# and to become productive using it is to write a few simple console applications with it that I would otherwise have written using Perl. So it would be really helpful to find resources that guide a Perl hacker quickly to success with C# and .NET. For example, what does a smart C# programmer use that a smart Perl programmer uses Getopt::Long for? Likewise, what's the C# alternative to Perl's Text::CSV_XS? More generally, how would I craft the same kinds of command-line filters in C# that I'm so accustomed to whipping up quickly and easily in Perl?

I'll learn all the tricky Windows programming stuff (WPF, XAML, etc.) after I've gotten comfortable with the core C# language and the basics of the .NET Framework.

Thank you in advance for your helpful responses. And please:  no programming language war in this thread. I have to learn C#, and I promise I won't stop hacking Perl. Fair enough?

Jim

In reply to Perl Programmer Learning C#, Seeking Helpful Resources, Tips by Jim

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