Which Microsoft Visual Express Do I Need?

Ok so I want to learn how to code.

I basically know nothing about coding, but I at least know things about html to create websites for myself.

The kind of bots I want to make for myself are just automation tools for websites. Like automatic account creators at web 2.0s, creating posts, scraping data from Google and other websites. Things like that.

Ive been reading a little bit on BHW and people are saying C# is a pretty easy language to learn and all you really need are the free visual express versions from Microsoft.

So heres the URL im looking at right now: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstud...itions/product-comparison#expressCompareTable im trying to work out which one to download that will best help me with the kind of applications I want to create.

Since you've expressed an interest in C#, then you should download Visual C# 2010 Express. Visual Web Developer is for building ASP.NET websites, and the version for Windows Phone doesn't make sense for what you want to do.

For the types of bots that you want to make, you're going to want to get familiar with the following .NET classes/namespaces at the very least:

System.IO
System.Net
System.Web.HttpRequest
System.Web.HttpResponse
System.Threading
System.Text.RegularExpressions (and to make use of that, you need to learn something about Regular Expressions, which will come in handy when scraping)

You can look these up on MSDN Library:


I admire your ambition, but if you "basically know nothing about coding," then I'm afraid that you have your work cut out for you if your first projects are going to be web 2.0 bots and scrapers. You need to have an understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP) and the .NET Framework. Then you need to learn how to use the IDE (integrated development environment -- i.e., Visual Studio or the Express editions). My advice to you is to look for beginner .NET books on Amazon (or at your local library) and work on a few "Hello, World" type projects before you try the bot stuff.

Good luck and have fun.

Hey, thanks heaps for giving me specific areas that I should learn more about for creating bots to create web2.0 accounts and scrapping and things.

It will help me a lot... I think once get into this it will be really fun, but yeah at first I need to wrap my head around exactly whats going on with the .NET Framework and all of these things.

Google will help me a lot, and also from reading posts by other people here stackoverflow has helped them also, when they are stuck.

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-csharp-express

There we go.

Hey, thanks heaps for giving me specific areas that I should learn more about for creating bots to create web2.0 accounts and scrapping and things.

It will help me a lot... I think once get into this it will be really fun, but yeah at first I need to wrap my head around exactly whats going on with the .NET Framework and all of these things.

Google will help me a lot, and also from reading posts by other people here stackoverflow has helped them also, when they are stuck.

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You're welcome. The Internet is good for looking up things here and there to fill in the gaps, but I strongly recommend starting with a well written and well organized book on .NET and your chosen language. Otherwise, I believe you'll be setting yourself up for a lot of frustrating moments. Even if you do learn programming solely from resources on the Internet, you still need to know the right terminology to use when searching. Anyway, how you want to learn and what you want to learn are up to you of course, I'm just giving you my opinion.

IMO, I would recommend you start with JAVA. It is FREE and also a pretty STRICT language. Oh but .NET is similar.

Well you can start by trying to build a simple User CMS. Probably simple registration and user management.

For example, make sure you cover all areas of creating, retrieving, updating and deleting of the users.

Get used to the logic! Ignore the frameworks available, do pure coding! Have fun!