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.