The C# Programming Language

C# (pronounced “See Sharp”) is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming

language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately

familiar to C, C++, and Java programmers. C# is standardized by ECMA International as

the ECMA-334 standard and by ISO/IEC as the ISO/IEC 23270 standard. Microsoft’s C#

compiler for the .NET Framework is a conforming implementation of both of these

standards.

C# is an object-oriented language, but C# further includes support for component-oriented

programming. Contemporary software design increasingly relies on software components

in the form of self-contained and self-describing packages of functionality. Key to such

components is that they present a programming model with properties, methods, and

events; they have attributes that provide declarative information about the component;

and they incorporate their own documentation. C# provides language constructs to directly

support these concepts, making C# a very natural language in which to create and use

software components.

Several C# features aid in the construction of robust and durable applications: Garbage

collection automatically reclaims memory occupied by unused objects; exception handling

provides a structured and extensible approach to error detection and recovery; and the

type-safe design of the language makes it impossible to read from uninitialized variables,

to index arrays beyond their bounds, or to perform unchecked type casts.