What is C#?

C# (pronounced C-Sharp) is a new programming language introduced with the Microsoft .NET framework and is no doubt the language of choice in .NET environment. It was first created in the late 1990's as part of Microsoft’s whole .NET strategy. It is a whole new language free of backward compatibility curse and a whole bunch of new, exciting and promising features. It is an Object Oriented Programming language, which at its core, has similarities with Java, C++ and VB.

In fact, C# combines the power & efficiency of C++, simple & clean OO design of Java, and code simplification of Visual Basic. Like Java, C# also does not allow multiple inheritance and use of pointers (in safe and managed code) while it does provide garbage memory collection at runtime, type and memory access checking. But, contrary to java, C# keeps the different useful concepts of C++ like operator overloading, enumerations, pre-processor directives, pointers (in unmanaged and un-safe code), function pointers (in the form of delegates), also promises to have template support (with the name of generics) in next versions. Like VB it also supports the concepts of properties (context sensitive accessor to fields).

In addition to this, C# comes up with some new/exciting features like reflections, attributes, marshalling, remoting, threads, streams, data access with ADO.NET, etc. C# programming language is designed from the scratch keeping in mind the Microsoft.Net environment. MS.Net (and thus C#) programs runs on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which provides the runtime support to them.

Sample C# Application

Using System
Class Sample
{
public static void main()
{
Console.WriteLine (“Hello World”)
}
}

Index

 

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