What's Out There?

[Tim Roberts]

As I'm getting started up with C#, I understand that much of the beauty is
the huge set of classes in the CLR. The same thing is true of my current
favorite language, Python; the beauty is the richness of the standard
library, allowing me to craft useful programs in just a few lines.

With Python, I can find out what's available to me by browsing through the
..py files in the standard library directory. That's something I seem to be
missing with C#: I can't get a grasp on what tools are at my disposal.

Can you suggest a good resource that collects the CLR classes in a useful
and easy-to-browse reference form? MSDN has good drill-down information,
but it doesn't seem to be the right choice for browsing. It just takes too
long to move from place to place for each tidbit of info.
--
Tim Roberts, ti**@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

[Peter Duniho]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:12:42 -0800, Tim Roberts <ti**@probo.comwrote:

[...]
Can you suggest a good resource that collects the CLR classes in a useful
and easy-to-browse reference form? MSDN has good drill-down information,
but it doesn't seem to be the right choice for browsing. It just takes
too
long to move from place to place for each tidbit of info.

You might check out Reflector
(http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/). It displays detailed
information straight from the actual .NET assemblies.

As for MSDN, you're right...that's one slow web site. You might try using
Google's new-ish browser, Chrome. I don't have first-hand experience with
it, but I've heard that they focused on optimizing Javascript performance,
and so it's possible that the MSDN experience would be more acceptable
using that browser.

That said, a lot of the time a Google or MSDN search based on a simple
description of your actual _task_ will quickly point you in the right
direction, without having to browse a bunch of irrelevant classes just to
find the one you're actually interested in.

Pete

[Tim Sprout]

Tim Roberts wrote:

As I'm getting started up with C#, I understand that much of the beauty is
the huge set of classes in the CLR. The same thing is true of my current
favorite language, Python; the beauty is the richness of the standard
library, allowing me to craft useful programs in just a few lines.

With Python, I can find out what's available to me by browsing through the
.py files in the standard library directory. That's something I seem to be
missing with C#: I can't get a grasp on what tools are at my disposal.

Can you suggest a good resource that collects the CLR classes in a useful
and easy-to-browse reference form? MSDN has good drill-down information,
but it doesn't seem to be the right choice for browsing. It just takes too
long to move from place to place for each tidbit of info.

Hi Tim Roberts...I enjoy your posts over at comp.lang.asm.x86

--Tim Sprout

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

Tim Roberts wrote:

As I'm getting started up with C#, I understand that much of the beauty is
the huge set of classes in the CLR. The same thing is true of my current
favorite language, Python; the beauty is the richness of the standard
library, allowing me to craft useful programs in just a few lines.

With Python, I can find out what's available to me by browsing through the
.py files in the standard library directory. That's something I seem to be
missing with C#: I can't get a grasp on what tools are at my disposal.

Can you suggest a good resource that collects the CLR classes in a useful
and easy-to-browse reference form? MSDN has good drill-down information,
but it doesn't seem to be the right choice for browsing. It just takes too
long to move from place to place for each tidbit of info.

You can get a copy of the MSDN docs on your own PC.

It is structured with namespaces so browsing should
be possible.

Not that much different from Python - just bigger,
which is supposed to be a good thing.

Arne