Introduction to C#

Microsoft developed C# late in the 1990s and was part of Microsoft’s overall .NET strategy.

The choice of a language depends upon many factors such as hardware environment, business environment user requirements and so on.

C and C++ are the two popular and most widely used languages in the software industry for the past two decades. However these languages suffer from number of shortcomings such as high complexity, not truly object oriented, not suitable for working with web technologies, poor type safety etc.

VB – not truly an object oriented language and becomes increasingly difficult to use when systems becomes large.

Microsoft wanted an environment that is completely in tune with current and emerging Web-programming practices and one that easily integrates with existing systems. Microsoft therefore wanted to design a new language starting with a clean state. The result is C#.

 C#’s chief architect was Anders Hejlsberg.

 In January 1999, at Microsoft, Anders Hejlsberg formed a team to build a new language at the time called Cool, which stood for "C-like Object Oriented Language". By the time the .NET project was publicly announced at the July 2000 Professional Developers Conference, the language had been renamed C#.

C# is directly related to C, C++, and Java.

         It retains the power of C and C++ and the elegance of java.

    C# derives its syntax, Keywords and Operators from C.

           All executable statements must end with a semicolon.

         All keywords are declared in lower case.

           The operator set from C, including ==(comparison equal to), ++(increment operator),

          -- (decrement operator), bitwise operator etc., are retained in C#.

C# builds upon and improves the object model defined by C++.

C# has been derived from and belongs to the family of C/C++, at the same time; it simplifies and modernizes the predecessors. 

C# is purely object oriented. For example, C# does not support for multiple inheritance, and all classes are derived from the class called System. Object class. 

        C# simplifies C - integer and Boolean are different

        C# eliminates the use of -> operator for referring to members of a type’s instance

 C# and .NET Framework

 C# is a computer language that has a special relationship to its runtime environment, the

.NET Framework.

  C# is the first and one and only language that is developed from the clean state to target .Net Framework.

By design, C# is the programming language that most directly reflects the underlying Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

Most of its intrinsic types correspond to value-types implemented by the CLI framework.

Some of the components of .Net framework are actually coded in C#.

   The libraries used by C# are the ones defined by the .NET Framework.

   Any language, that target .Net Framework, use libraries defined in .Net Framework.

   Further, all the features defined at the framework level are available to the language.

C# and OOPS

The entry point method of a C# program is the Main() method. The Main() method is supposed to be placed inside a type definition i.e., a class definition or a structure definition. Thus, C# forces to have at least one type defined in a program. By this way, any C# program is to some extent object oriented.