Why C# ?

It would not be surprising if most of the programmers today would take a pilgrimage if they were asked to revert back to assembly language, simply because of the complexities involved with programming in assembly. Not only do we have to worry about our complex business and programming logic but also of low-level system complexities such as memory management. It is clearly evident that as new programming languages evolved programming became simpler. Languages like C evolved, which gave the programmer named memory locations like variables and programming constructs like loops and conditional branching. With the advent of C++ came the object-oriented programming, which allowed the programmer to model the real world as it is in the ‘virtual’ programming realm. However, C/C++ were still considered to be difficult to program with. Inexperienced programmers could blunder easily. With the advent of GUI (Graphical User Interface) based operating systems like Windows coming into the picture newer programming languages like Visual Basic evolved. Visual Basic is still considered the programming language with the largest following because of the simplicity of use it has to offer.

However though Visual Basic was easy to use, this ease was provided with trade-off for power. Some of the tasks that the C/C++ programmers could do (like memory management) was hardly possible with Visual Basic. The need for a language that could provide the developers with the power of C/C++ and the simplicity of Visual Basic was felt. This is where C# comes into the picture. C# provides developers easy programmability of Visual Basic and the awesome raw power of C/C++. C# is one of the 20+ languages supported by the .net framework. However, the name C# sounds synonymous with .net, for the simple reason that most of the .net base classes (which constitute a major part of the .net framework) were written In C#.

Apart from being the preferred language to program on the .net platform, it is equally important to consider C# as an object-oriented language. In fact C# can be thought of as a modern replacement for C/C++.