Manning - Publications Windows Forms in Action

about this book

The .NET Framework is composed of such a large range of topics that it is impossible to cover all of them in a single book of any depth. This section introduces the focus of this book, and provides an overview of the contents and conventions used in the text. The end of this section describes the online forum available for any questions or comments on the book, and explains how the source code used in the book can be downloaded from the Internet.

Introducing .NET

Microsoft has a history of reinventing itself. Originally strictly an operating systems company, it expanded into office applications with the likes of Word and Excel, and later took on the Internet with Internet Explorer. The push behind the creation of .NET was likely driven by the success of the Internet and Java as a general environment for large-scale computing solutions. The first version of the framework defined two rather important ideas. The first was a new language, C#, and the second was a standard framework for Windows-based solutions.

The easiest way to understand C# might be to imagine someone writing down all the annoying aspects of C++ and then designing a language to do away with each annoyance. In C++, for example, dealing with pointers can be painful; a number of coding errors are not caught by the compiler (such as if (x = 5)); manipulating strings can be difficult; and there is no good way to safely “downcast” an object to a derived type. The predecessors of C and C++, the B and BPCL languages, did not define a formal type system, which may well account for the rather free-wheeling nature of integers, pointers, and characters in these languages.

The C# language was redesigned from the ground up with the idea of retaining the flexibility of C and C++ while formalizing the type system and language syntax. Many common runtime errors in C++ are compiler errors in C#. Other distinct features include a built-in string type, lack of global variables, and integration of critical system and application errors into a common exception model. Appendix A of this book provides an overview of the syntax, keywords, and features of the C# language. The “What’s new in 2.0” section later in this introduction summarizes the changes made for the 2.0 release of the .NET Framework.