Programming in the .NET Environment

History and Design Goals

C# (pronounced “see sharp” or “sea sharp”) is a new language developed to run on the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR).

A Brief History of C++ and C#

All languages make a trade-off between simplicity and power. Of the Microsoft languages, Visual Basic has placed a higher priority on simplicity and productivity than on power. Visual C++, on the other hand, provides a tremendous amount of power, but it's also a more complex and less productive language.

The Visual C++ team has talked about a “simpler C++” for a number of years. Such a language would be like C++, but would be much simpler and more productive to use. We explored a few ideas of what “simpler and more productive” might mean, but it wasn't clear what the right ...