Neo Basic Tutorial (Part 1)

Introduction

NEO went throw a rapid development over the last years.What started out as Antschares (ANS) grew to one of the largest Cryptocurrencies in the world. It’s split into two coins, with NEO as the governance tokens and GAS as the driving force of the network, underline it’s focus on smart contracts and smart economy. It promises more and cheaper execution costs of smart contracts, where small operations are designed to be free.

What makes it interesting for me, it’s a support system of multiple programming languages and platforms. I’m a web developer with a C# background, developing on Windows. In this tutorial, you can see how, to develop your own smart contract on this setup starting from

• Setting up the development environment
• Create a Smart Contract in C#
• Connect the Smart Contract to your Web Application+
• Learn about the NEP-5 Token

Smart Contract definition

Now this already contained some buzzwords. You probably already heard of a Smart Contract. Let's look at the Wikipedia definition:

A smart contract is a computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. Smart contracts allow the performance of credible transactions without third parties. These transactions are trackable and irreversible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract

Lets see how NEO fits this definition:

Computer protocol intended to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract:
This part fits all fulfilled by every modern computer language, and NEO is based on them.

performance of credible transactions without third parties: A contract can be executable by everyone, who has access to the internet.”

These transactions are trackable and irreversible: The NEO blockchain is driven by several Masternodes which are distributed over several countries and controlled by different organisations. Once a transaction is written all subsequent transactions build on top of it. Changing it results in the change of all subsequent transactions. Therefor, after several following transactions, a transaction can be considered irreversible.

Of course this is only a very basic analysis and I’m more interested in the technology.

Wrapup and techologies

Let's wrap up the introduction with why I’m actually writing it. The main motivator right now is the third APP challenge from City of Zion (https://medium.com/proof-of-working/city-of-zion-competition-3-828281a71c34 ).
These challenges are kinda unique to NEO and aim to drive forward the ecosystem. I also participated in the last challenge, where I didn’t win, but got a lot of experience developing for NEO. Now I want to put this gained knowledge into a tutorial, so NEO can get even bigger and better.

My development environment and tools are:

• Windows 10
• Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition
• Docker
• Neo-debugger-tools
• Angular
• Neonjs

Cheerse, Stefan