Do many of you C++ coders also code with C#? I am completely brand new and am wasting a lot of time trying to decide which route to take, sighs.

I am interested in all sorts of applications for programming skills from simple handy tools to have around the desktop to reverse engineering to device drivers.

As I understand, C++ uses native code and is entirely portable, C# uses the .net framework which makes it hard to code programs that are easily deployable on host machines without the appropriate .net framework installed. Thats not really a worry to me since I will be coding purely for me anway.

I was close to settling on C++ until I read an interesting article comparing the two which suggested that for every 1 line of code in C# you would need to write between 3-5 in C++ to achieve the same task (later learning that this is because of the class modules that C# can make use of).

Whilst my motivation for learning programming is for my desire to learn about computing and everything in it, I know myself think I could get demotivated by not being able to figure out the myriad of problems that unmanaged code presents.

Sorry this is turning into an essay so I will stop clearing my throat.

These are some of my coding goals whichever route I take:

1. automating the web like a web scraper/filler
2. a team-viewer like application
3. being able to extend functionality of existing programs by hooking and creating ad-ons without source code
4. automating the windows invironment like predicting what I am going to do based on my historic behaviour (eg. I go to documents and it learns that I normally next go to downloads so just opens downloads folder, stuff like that).
6. manipulating memory/graphics
7. controling packets and network activity.

And thats about it so far.