The C# Programming Language

“Based on my own experience, I can safely say that every .NET developer who reads this will have at least one 'aha' moment and will be a better developer for it.”

–From the Foreword by Don Box

The popular C# programming language combines the high productivity of rapid application development languages with the raw power of C and C++. Now, C# 3.0 adds functional programming techniques and LINQ, Language INtegrated Query. The C# Programming Language, Third Edition, is the authoritative and annotated technical reference for C# 3.0.

Written by Anders Hejlsberg, the language's architect, and his colleagues, Mads Torgersen, Scott Wiltamuth, and Peter Golde, this volume has been completely updated and reorganized for C# 3.0. The book provides the complete specification of the language, along with descriptions, reference materials, code samples, and annotations from nine prominent C# gurus.

The many annotations–a new feature in this edition–bring a depth and breadth of understanding rarely found in any programming book. As the main text of the book introduces the concepts of the C# language, cogent annotations explain why they are important, how they are used, how they relate to other languages, and even how they evolved.

This book is the definitive, must-have reference for any developer who wants to understand C#.

Anders Hejlsberg is a programming legend. He is the architect of the C# language and a Microsoft Technical Fellow. He joined Microsoft in 1996, following a 13-year career at Borland, where he was the chief architect of Delphi and Turbo Pascal.

Mads Torgersen is a senior program manager at Microsoft. As the program manager for the C# language, he runs the C# language design meetings and maintains the C# language specification. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2005, Mads was an associate professor at the University of Aarhus, teaching and researching object-oriented programming languages. There, he led the group that designed and implemented generic wildcards for the Java Programming Language.

Scott Wiltamuth is partner program manager for Visual Studio. While at Microsoft, he has worked on a wide range of developer-oriented projects, including Visual Basic, VBScript, JScript, Visual J++, and Visual C#. Scott is one of the designers of the C# language, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Stanford University.

Before leaving Microsoft, Peter Golde served as the lead developer of Microsoft's C# compiler. As the primary Microsoft representative on the ECMA committee that standardized C#, he led the implementation of the compiler and worked on the language design.