Yesterday, I finished my third week of C# Boot-Camp at the QA training centre in London.  It was a pretty difficult week this week as we carried on building on what we have previously learnt in the beginning weeks. It’s really important to get a good understanding of the work we are doing because if you don’t you will have nothing to build on!

This week we mainly learnt about:

• Exceptions
• Statics
• Visual Studio Testing Tools
• Working with Files
• EXAM – Create an OO Computer Program Using C#

Exceptions weren’t that hard to get my head around, as the syntax was pretty easy to learn. Exceptions, realistically should never happen, as it is an ‘exception’ and therefore a one off (they should hardly ever happen).  The reason behind exceptions is that you try and predict what will go wrong and cause the program to crash, before it happens. The way we do this is to put the code we are hoping will work inside a ‘try’ block, the code we want to run if ‘try’ black code doesn’t work inside a ‘catch’ block and the code that will always run no matter what after the ‘try’ and ‘catch’ is the, ‘finally’ block. They are the three fundamental pieces of code you will need to remember when writing good Object Orientated code. Don’t forget to use ‘throw’ when you want to throw an exception, either one that you have made yourself or a built in one.

Statics was particularly hard subject for me in the third week of boot-camp. I struggled to get to grips with static classes and constructors and getting them to work with each other. After doing a lot of exercises in both the training room and at home I began to understand what it was all about. Afterwards I had a base to build on so then I started to compare the difference between the static and instance methods and started applying read-only fields.

Also in my third week I learnt how to use the Visual Studio Testing Tools, mainly Unit Testing. I created Unit Test Projects in Visual Studio 2010 and started testing methods that I had written to add, subtract, multiply and divide using looping! This was a very interesting task to do as you think that adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing are easy, but programmatically they are much more difficult than you think. I later added programmatic methods for calculation the power and modulus and tested them also. You have to be carefully when testing the methods you have written because you need to make sure that the method will work no matter what numbers you want to give it to test, and that you know what the result is before you test it.

The ‘working with files’ topic wasn’t particularly anything new to me, as I had previously been set a project at work which consisted of me writing information about a PC to a .txt file. Although I had learnt the syntax on my own and managed to get the code to work, it was also important that went through the work in the training room as well so that I could pick up on any little bits that I may have missed. Before you go ahead and write some code to read or write from a file, please do not forget to add the following reference as it may save you alot of time de-bugging!

Using    System.IO;

The last thing we did on our 3^rd Week of C# Boot-Camp is a City and Guilds Exam which was ‘Creating an Object Orientated Computer Program using C#’. We had previously completed a mock exam earlier on in the week and I didn’t find it too difficult. Most of the marks are gained by meeting the specification requirements I.e. naming controls, comments etc. It was a 4hr exam, so after I had completed it, I made sure I had time at the end to scan through my code and add extra comments where appropriate. I also compared and ticked off requirements on my spec when going through my code to make sure I had met them. I am looking forward to writing another blog next week and also letting you guys know what my result was!