Summary

This chapter presented those core enhancements to the .NET languages that are key to you, as a developer, in writing more and better code during your development day. Advancements such as generics will help you ensure type safety in collections and reduce error rates as a result. Similarly, nullable types will allow you to code without forcing values into unassigned variables and then coding around these "magic numbers." These and similar advancements made to both the C# and VB languages work to further evolve your toolset and increase your productivity.

Finally, this chapter briefly covered some of the new items inside the .NET Framework. Clearly, there is a lot that is new. The Framework is becoming so large that developers (and books) are often forced to specialize in a particular area. We suggest that you look at our list of enhancements and then jump off to your own specialty area for further exploration.