Approaching C# and the .net platform...

[EHaskins]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

That's a moot point now. Microsoft Dreamspark offers Visual Studio to everyone who is in college. I also have to say that the Experssion Studio Editor is a pretty good wysiwyg editor.
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

MSDNAA still offers more products, but Dreamspark is a good program.

Expression is a good graphics editor, but unless you're working with WPF there isn't much reason for it. Personally I think you should learn WinForms before you try to learn WPF.

Originally Posted by lachoneus8

Another avenue is to start with something fun that will keep you coming back.... look up Microsoft XNA, a free game development engine that can produce applications for PC or Xbox360. This engine is very easy to learn, and there are a large number of tutorials that can get you started in doing something you'll have a lot of fun with as well as learn a new language.

XNA is cool, but some of the 3D code gets difficult, so it's probably better to do some 2D stuff first to get familiar with the tools.

Originally Posted by StevenB

Similar, yes. Related, no. C# was influenced by Java and has a lot of similar attributes. Java is open-source and is explicitly designed to run on many platforms (Windows, Linux, cell phones, etc.). C# is still primarily targeted at Windows (surprise!), although people are working on that.

Really, it doesn't matter which GUI toolkit you work with first. They're all somewhat similar once you understand the basic concepts. I've worked with AWT/Swing, Qt, GTK2, and .NET. Personally, I prefer the open-source libraries.

C# as a language is not limited to windows. You could make the argument that .net Framework is, but it now works on Windows, Windows Mobile PDAs and phones, Zune, XBox 360, Mac(Sliverlight) and Linux(Silverlight). Plus you've always got mono, which has most of .net 2 on Mac and Linux.