Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Kick Start

Visual C# .NET

C# is an important aspect of the .NET Framework; it was announced in July 2000, and is built on the shoulders of not only C++, but also Java. Java programmers will find a lot that's familiar in C. Perhaps the most important aspect of Java that came over to C# is the emphasis on security, particularly on the use of pointers. Although C# still supports pointers, their use is highly restricted, making the old hacker's trick of using pointers to rewrite code impossible to implement. We'll see more on pointers and their place in C# (you have to designate code with pointers in it as “unsafe”) in Chapter 13.

C# itself was developed by a small team, led by Anders Hejlsberg (who was a major player in the development of both Turbo Pascal ...