A Comparative Overview of C#

This article focuses on the new ways of programming C# offers, and how it intends to improve upon its two closest neighbors, Java and C++. C# improves on C++ in a similar way to Java in many respects, so I'm not going to be re-explaining things like the benefits of a single-rooted object hierarchy. This article begins with a brief summary of the similarities between C# and Java, and then goes into exploring the new C# features. You can convert PDF to word if necessary to get a printable view of the article.

Background

In June 2000, Microsoft announced both the .NET platform and a new programming language called C#. C# is a strongly-typed object-oriented language designed to give the optimum blend of simplicity, expressiveness, and performance. The .NET platform is centered around a Common Language Runtime (similar to a JVM) and a set of libraries which can be exploited by a wide variety of languages which are able to work together by all compiling to an intermediate language (IL). C# and .NET are a little symbiotic: some features of C# are there to work well with .NET, and some features of .NET are there to work well with C# (though .NET aims to work well with many languages). Projects created with C# and .NET are usually compatible with most web hosting providers. This article is mostly concerned with C#, but sometimes it is useful to discuss .NET too. The C# language was built with the hindsight of many languages, but most notably Java and C++. It was co-authored by Anders Hejlsberg (who is famous for the design of the Delphi language), and Scott Wiltamuth.

1. C# and Java

Below is a list of features C# and Java share, which are intended to improve on C++. These features are not the focus of this article, but it is very important to be aware of the similarities.

• Compiles into machine-independent language-independent code which runs in a managed execution environment.
• Garbage Collection coupled with the elimination of pointers (in C# restricted use is permitted within code marked unsafe)
• Powerful reflection capabilities
• No header files, all code scoped to packages or assemblies, no problems declaring one class before another with circular dependencies
• Classes all descend from object and must be allocated on the heap with new keyword
• Thread support by putting a lock on objects when entering code marked as locked/synchronized
• Interfaces, with multiple-inheritance of interfaces, single inheritance of implementations
• Inner classes
• No concept of inheriting a class with a specified access level
• No global functions or constants, everything belongs to a class
• Arrays and strings with lengths built-in and bounds checking
• The '.' operator is always used, no more ->, :: operators
• null and boolean/bool are keywords
• All values are initialized before use
• Can't use integers to govern if statements
• Try Blocks can have a finally clause