Learning C# 3.0

The C# Language

The C# language is disarmingly simple, which makes it good for beginners, but C# also includes all the support for the structured, component-based, object-oriented programming that one expects of a modern language built on the shoulders of C++ and Java. In other words, it’s a fully featured language appropriate for developing large-scale applications, but at the same time it is designed to be easy to learn.

A small team led by two distinguished Microsoft engineers, Anders Hejlsberg and Scott Wiltamuth, developed the original C# language. Hejlsberg is also known for creating Turbo Pascal, a popular language for PC programming, and for leading the team that designed Borland Delphi, one of the first successful integrated development environments (IDEs) for client/server programming.

The goal of C# is to provide a simple, safe, object-oriented, high-performance language for .NET development. C# is simple because there are relatively few keywords. Keywords are special words reserved by the language that have a specific meaning within all C# programs, including if, while, and for. You’ll learn about these keywords in the coming chapters.

C# is considered safe because the language is type-safe, which is an important mechanism to help you find bugs early in the development process, as you’ll see later. This makes for code that is easier to maintain and programs that are more reliable.

C# was designed, from the very start, to support object-oriented programming. In this book, we’ll explain not only how to write object-oriented programs, but also why object-oriented programming has become so popular. The short answer is this: programs are becoming increasingly complex, and object-oriented programming techniques help you manage that complexity.

C# was designed for .NET, and .NET was designed (in part) for developing web and web-aware programs. The Internet is a primary resource in most .NET applications.