Chapter 1. Introducing C#
The C# programming language (pronounced “see sharp”) is used for many kinds of applications, including websites, cloud-based systems, IoT devices, machine learning, desktop applications, embedded controllers, mobile apps, games, and command-line utilities. C#, along with the supporting runtime, libraries, and tools known collectively as .NET, has been center stage for Windows developers for almost two decades, but in recent years, it has also made inroads into other platforms. In June 2016, Microsoft released version 1.0 of .NET Core, a cross-platform version of .NET, enabling web apps, microservices, and console applications written in C# to run on macOS and Linux, as well as on Windows.
This push into other platforms has gone hand in hand with Microsoft’s embrace of open source development. In C#’s early history, Microsoft guarded all of its source code closely,1 but today, pretty much everything surrounding C# is developed in the open, with code contributions from outside of Microsoft being welcome. New language feature proposals are published on GitHub, enabling community involvement from the earliest stages. In 2014, the .NET Foundation (https://dotnetfoundation.org/) was created to foster the development of open source projects in the .NET world, and many of Microsoft’s most important C# and .NET projects are now under the foundation’s governance (in addition to many non-Microsoft projects). This includes Microsoft’s C# compiler, which is at https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn ...
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