C#, Visual Basic, C++/CLI, and F#

Chapter 53: C#, Visual Basic, C++/CLI, and

F#

What’s In This Chapter?

• Namespaces

• Defining types

• Methods

• Arrays

• Control statements

• Loops

• Exception handling

• Inheritance

• Resource management

• Delegates

• Events

• Generics

• LINQ queries

• C++/CLI mixing native and managed code

C# is the programming language designed for .NET. More than 50 languages exist for writing .NET applications—for example, Eiffel, Smalltalk, COBOL, Haskell, Pizza, Pascal, Delphi, Oberon, Prolog, and Ruby. Microsoft alone delivers the languages C#, Visual Basic, C++/CLI, J#, JScript.NET, and F#.

Every language has advantages and disadvantages; some things can be done easily with one language but are complicated with another one. The classes from the .NET Framework are always the same, but the syntax of the language abstracts various features from the framework. For example, the C# using statement makes it easy to use the objects implementing the IDisposable interface. Other languages need more code for the same functionality.

The most commonly used .NET languages from Microsoft are C# and Visual Basic. C# was newly designed for .NET with ideas from C++, Java, Pascal, and other languages. Visual Basic has its roots in Visual Basic 6 and was extended with object-oriented features for .NET.

C++/CLI is an extension to C++ that is an ECMA standard (ECMA 372). The big advantage of C++/CLI is the ability to mix native code with managed code. You can extend existing native C++ applications and add .NET functionality, and you can add .NET classes to native libraries so that they can be used from other .NET languages such as C#. It is also possible to write completely managed applications with C++/CLI.

F# is a new language within Visual Studio that offers special support for functional programming. It works well with .NET because it supports traditional object-oriented programming as well. To give you some information what functional programming with F# means: Functions can be used as values. This makes it easy to compose functions from multiple functions, and do function pipelining where functions are chained after each other.

This chapter shows you how to convert .NET applications from one language to another. If you see sample code with Visual Basic or C++/CLI, you can easily map this to C#, and the other way around. Don't assume you can learn F# or C++/CLI with this comparison because it mainly gives information about how the C# ideas map to the other languages, but not to the core concepts and ideas of the other languages.

NOTE: For this chapter, I assume that you know C# and have read the first few chapters of this book. It is not necessary to know Visual Basic, C++/CLI, and F#.

This article is excerpted from chapter 53 "C#, Visual Basic, C++/CLI, and F#" of the book "Professional C# 4 and .NET 4" by Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Jay Glynn, Karli Watson, Morgan Skinner (ISBN: 978-0-470-50225-9, Wrox, 2010, Copyright Wiley Publishing Inc.)