Chapter 1. The changing face of C# development

Do you know what I really like about dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, and Groovy? They suck away fluff from your code, leaving just the essence of it—the bits that really do something. Tedious formality gives way to features such as generators, lambda expressions, and list comprehensions.

The interesting thing is that few of the features that tend to give dynamic languages their lightweight feel have anything to do with being dynamic. Some do, of course—duck typing and some of the magic used in Active Record, for example—but statically typed languages don’t have to be clumsy and heavyweight.

Enter C#. In some ways, C# 1 could have been seen as a nicer version of the Java language, circa 2001. The similarities were all too clear, but C# had a few extras: properties as a first-class feature in the language, delegates and events, foreach loops, using statements, explicit method overriding, operator overloading, and custom value types, to name a few. Obviously, language preference is a personal issue, but C# 1 definitely felt like a step up from Java when I first started using it.

1.1. Starting with a simple data type

1.2. Sorting and filtering

1.3. Handling an absence of data

1.4. Introducing LINQ

1.5. COM and dynamic typing

1.6. Writing asynchronous code without the heartache

1.7. Dissecting the .NET platform

1.8. Making your code super awesome

1.9. Summary