How to find right .NET method among the thousands?

[Beginner60]

I am new to .NET but not new to programming, but a little rusty. While learning VB.NET or VBA, I can't find any reference manual anywhere that can point me to the right class and method to do whatever I want. I have 4 books, and all of them simply reference only the methods they teach in the book, which aren't even a drop in the bucket relative to how many there are.

I have speent days in Google and on MSDN, and I find nothing that constitutes a .NET reference manual. I have searched several forums and nobody seems to have this answer.

When I programmed in the PROGRESS software, they had a manual that detailed every method, function, etc. with all of the calling procedures and parameters involved. But this is extremely frustrating not to be able to find the references I need.

I sure hope that someone here can help with this problem. I am trying to use VS 2012 and its magic guessor of what your typing, but how do I know what to start typing to get it to work???

Thanks and Merry Christmas,
Bill

 

[MakeItSo]

Hi Bill,

simply put: before you start typing, know what you want to achieve. Once you know what you want to achieve, decide how you want to achieve it (desktop app with UI? Console application with or without user input? web application? etc.)
Available methods may vary depending on whether you are programming a Windows Forms app, WPF, ASP.Net web app or MVC web app.

There is no use trying to google for methods before knowing what you want to achive. For example, let's say you read about a method called SelectSingleNode (XMLDocument, result is XMLNode) that looks all good and fine but after analysing what you want to achieve you find out that in this case it is best to read your XML file with a StreamReader and parse it with Regular Expressions - your googling then was a waste of time.

Do you have a specific task at hand that you wish to achieve? An old VB6 app or VBA macro that you would like to "translate" perhaps?
I have found that whenever I tried to do such a thing, it was best to just write the .Net app from scratch because with C# (or VB.Net) there are just so much more possibilities. What used to take up 100 lines and some self-written functions may now only comprise five lines because all that desired functionality may be ready at hand without need for own functions.

Cheers,
MakeItSo

ôKnowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.ö (Kofi Annan)
Oppose SOPA, PIPA, ACTA; measures to curb freedom of information under whatever name whatsoever.

 

[jebenson]

This would be a good place to start:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y4wf33f0.aspx

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