Some thoughts about C#

College is pretty time consuming at the moment but not because it’s so hard for me to keep up with our progress in the programming lectures, math does the thing.

No, there’s another thing I will talk with about today. Well, actually I will talk and you will listen (or read), so no chance for you to interrupt me (you could close your browser but you won’t do that, won’t you?).

So I will start with my little fairy tale. A long, long time ago, there was a boy who started programming (guess, yes, that’s me). I learned Delphi because it was the tool my father used at that time and so it was pretty easy to get it and write my very first programs. I was a real astronomy-fan and so I played around with a neat Access database with about 37.000 rows and my little Delphi program. I wrote lines and lines of code and finally I had an application which was cabable of drawing selected stars on the form, calculating the day of easter for the next ten thousand years and some other things.

Then I started doing DirectX with Delphi which was actually the time when I learnt most about programming. Juggling around with pointers, making my new desktop wallpaper the blue screen of death. The fact that nearly every line of free available source code was written in C/C++ was pretty annoying at that time but now I really benefit. It makes understanding C# a lot easier.

But now to the main topic, C#. In my eyes, it’s a mixture between C/C++ (guess why), Java and Delphi. There are some new language features and possibilities of the IDE which I’ve seen in Delphi before, some of them already from version 5 on (I’m using VS.Net 2003 now). One reason for this could be that Anders Hejlsberg, ex chief engineer at Borland and co-creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, moved to Microsoft and is now one of the co-founders of the C# programming language and the .Net-Framework.