Need an exercise suggestions to help me learn and exercise .NET

Question

Do you have any idea for a complex exercise that touches and covers most important and major concepts of .NET? (so I can learn while coding and implementation)

The exercise should NOT be for beginners, but for someone who already familiar with .net, but enough complex to teach new features of .NET 2 for example.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I always find it's easier to learn something when there is a personal benefit; so I'd suggest trying to write something that would be of use to you; whether that's a tool for tracking your cricket/golf/other sport you like to play in/etc. scores, or something for helping you file a tax return, or fill in a university application form, or even just to showcase your talents to use as a portfolio piece.

Something I've sat down to do (albeit with a bit of procrastination first) is to analyse assemblies for classes that look like they might implement an interface, but don't (so a class might have a method called Clone() but not implement ICloneable) -- you could do something like that -- maybe even get it as an fxCop rule, and integrate into the code analysis in VS2008

Alternatively, you could bid for work on a site like rentacoder.

Answer 2

One great exercise can be studying some good-quality source.

As example, take a source of Log4Net, Paint.NET or xacc (1st one much reader-friendly), study, do some modifications, test it, play with it...