Chapter 53: C#, Visual Basic, C++/CLI, and
F#
What’s In This Chapter?
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.