Microsoft describes C# as a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language derived from C and C++. Most independent observers would probably change that to derived from C, C++, and Java. Such descriptions are technically accurate but do little to convey the beauty or elegance of the language. Syntactically, C# is very similar to both C++ and Java, to such an extent that many keywords are the same, and C# also shares the same block structure with braces ({}) to mark blocks of code and semicolons to separate statements. The first impression of a piece of C# code is that it looks quite like C++ or Java code. Beyond that initial similarity, however, C# is a lot easier to learn than C++, and of comparable difficulty to Java. Its design is more in tune with modern developer tools than both of those other languages, and it has been designed to provide, simultaneously, the ease of use of Visual Basic and the high-performance, low-level memory access of C++, if required. Some of the features of C# are:
- Full support for classes and object-oriented programming, including
- both interface and implementation inheritance, virtual functions, and operator overloading.
- A consistent and well-defined set of basic types.
- Built-in support for automatic generation of XML documentation.
- Automatic cleanup of dynamically allocated memory.
- The facility to mark classes or methods with user-defined attributes. This can be useful for documentation and can have some effects on compilation (for example, marking methods to be compiled only in debug builds).
- Full access to the .NET base class library, as well as easy access to the Windows API (if you really need it, which will not be very often).
- Pointers and direct memory access are available if required, but the language has been designed in such a way that you can work without them in almost all cases.
- Support for properties and events in the style of Visual Basic.
- Just by changing the compiler options, you can compile either to an executable or to a library of .NET components that can be called up by other code in the same way as ActiveX controls (COM components).
- C# can be used to write ASP.NET dynamic web pages and XML Web services.