Intoduction to C sharp

 Intoduction to C sharp

       C#  (pronounced see sharp) is a multi-paradigm programming language encompassing strong typing, imperative, declarative, functional, procedural, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was developed by Microsoft within its .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270:2006). C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language Infrastructure.

      C# is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. Its development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg. The most recent version is C# 5.0, which was released on August 15, 2012.

Design goals

The ECMA standard lists these design goals for C#:

• The C# language is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language.
• The language, and implementations thereof, should provide support for software engineering principles such as strong type checking, array bounds checking, detection of attempts to use uninitialized variables, and automatic garbage collection. Software robustness, durability, and programmer productivity are important.
• The language is intended for use in developing software components suitable for deployment in distributed environments.
• Source code portability is very important, as is programmer portability, especially for those programmers already familiar with C and C++.
• Support for internationalization is very important.
• C# is intended to be suitable for writing applications for both hosted and embedded systems, ranging from the very large that use sophisticated operating systems, down to the very small having dedicated functions.
• Although C# applications are intended to be economical with regard to memory and processing power requirements, the language was not intended to compete directly on performance and size with C or assembly language.

Features of C# 2.0

• Partial classes which allow class implementation across more than one source file.
• Generics or parameterized types.
• Static classes that cannot be instantiated, and that only allows static members.
• Anonymous delegates.
• The accessibility of property accessors can be set independently.
• Nullable value types which provides improved interaction with SQL databases.
• Coalesce operator (??) returns the first of its operands which is not null or null, if no such operand exists.

Features of C# 3.0

• Language Integrated Query.  
• Object initializers & Collection initializers.
• Anonymous types.
• Implicitly-typed arrays.
• Lambda expressions.
• Automatic properties.
• Extension methods
• Partial methods.

Performance 

C# programs, like all programs written for the .NET and other virtual machine environments such as Java, tend to require more system resources than functionally similar applications that access machine resources more directly.

Platform 

Microsoft's current .NET implementation is only available on Windows.