Part 2. C# 2–5

This part of the book covers all the features introduced between C# 2 (shipped with Visual Studio 2005) and C# 5 (shipped with Visual Studio 2012). This is the same set of features that took up the entire third edition of this book. Much of it feels like ancient history now; for example, we simply take it for granted that C# includes generics.

This was a tremendously productive period for C#. Some of the features I’ll cover in this part are generics, nullable value types, anonymous methods, method group conversions, iterators, partial types, static classes, automatically implemented properties, implicitly typed local variables, implicitly typed arrays, object initializers, collection initializers, anonymous types, lambda expressions, extension methods, query expressions, dynamic typing, optional parameters, named arguments, COM improvements, generic covariance and contravariance, async/await, and caller information attributes. Phew!

I expect most of you to be at least somewhat familiar with most of the features, so I ramp up pretty fast in this part. Likewise, for the sake of reasonable brevity, I haven’t gone into as much detail as I did in the third edition. The intention is to cover a variety of reader needs: