Special Edition Using C#

The Evolution of C#

In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson invented C, their third in a series of experimental languages. C provided programmers with tremendous control over their code, which made a high degree of efficiency possible. C was the ideal development language for applications that needed to directly access hardware. However, the power of C sometimes led to problems, particularly with reference to pointers and manual memory management. Programmers could dereference memory without deallocating it, thereby leading to memory leaks. The effective use of C required a level of rigor that could not be accommodated in high-pressure enterprise development environments, where productivity and short cycle times were of prime importance. ...