• Chris Woodruff
• April 14, 2025
• Rust
• .NET, C#, dotnet, programming, rust
• 0 Comments

So today, I ran head-first into a Rust design decision that made me pause and go, “Wait… really?”

In C#, I can declare a variable with var and change it later. No fuss. In Rust? Not so fast. Your variables are frozen solid if you don’t explicitly ask for mutability. Welcome to Day 4: the world of let, mut, and what happens when your muscle memory meets a strict compiler.

• Chris Woodruff
• April 13, 2025
• Rust
• .NET, C#, dotnet, programming, rust
• 2 Comments

Let’s be honest—every new language journey begins the same way: with a humble “Hello, World!” It’s the developer’s rite of passage. So today, on Day 3 of my 42-day Rust challenge, I’m writing the most iconic two-word phrase in programming in both C# and Rust… and then tearing it apart.

Because while the output is the same, what these two languages make you say to get there reveals a lot about how they think.

• Chris Woodruff
• April 12, 2025
• Rust
• .NET, C#, dotnet, programming, rust
• 0 Comments

It’s Day 2 of my journey learning Rust as a longtime C# developer, and today I took the plunge: I installed Rust and created my first project. The whole thing felt a bit like unpacking a new toolbox—familiar enough to recognize the tools, but different enough that I had to check the manual.

• Chris Woodruff
• April 11, 2025
• Rust
• .NET, C#, dotnet, programming, rust
• 1 Comment

Today marks Day 1 of my 42-day challenge to learn Rust—with a twist. I’m not approaching this as a blank-slate beginner. I’m bringing along years of C# experience, mental muscle memory from countless LINQ expressions, async/await workflows, and enough IEnumerables to make your head spin.

But now? I’m learning a language that doesn’t have a garbage collector, doesn’t throw exceptions the same way, and thinks null is a bad idea.

• Chris Woodruff
• April 10, 2025
• Rust
• .NET, C#, dotnet, programming, rust
• 0 Comments

I’ve spent over a decade writing C# and building solutions on .NET. But for six weeks, we will step outside the managed world of garbage collection and runtime JIT to dive headfirst into Rust—a systems programming language that promises performance, safety, and no nulls.

Over the course of 42 days, we will learn something new about Rust every single day. We will fight the borrow checker. We will make mistakes. And I will blog it all from the perspective of a C# developer trying to make sense of it.