C# in Depth

Part 3. C# 3—revolutionizing how we code

There is no doubt that C#2 is a significant improvement over C#1. The benefits of generics in particular are fundamental to other changes, not just in C# 2 but also in C# 3. However, C# 2 was in some sense a piecemeal collection of features. Don’t get me wrong: they fit together nicely enough, but they address a set of individual issues. That was appropriate at that stage of C#’s development, but C#3 is different.

Almost every feature in C# 3 enables one very specific technology: LINQ. Many of the features are useful outside this context, and you certainly shouldn’t confine yourself to only using them when you happen to be writing a query expression, for example—but it would be equally silly not to recognise ...