Programming Languages Used

As far as language is concerned, this book largely takes a language-independent approach in the text. My aim was for the book to be accessible to experienced .NET programmers, whatever your preferred language. Unfortunately, though, I did have to pick some language to present the examples in! So for most of our examples we will use C# as the language of choice - which means you should at least be able to skim-read C#, even if you actually prefer to do your programming in another language. Although the printed samples in the book are in C#, for the benefit of VB programmers you'll find most of the samples are available for download in both C# and VB versions. There are also occasions in the book when we will need to present some specific sample in VB or C++ in order to illustrate some feature that is only available in that language. And of course we will freely use IL when we want to illustrate how something compiles.

Language-Specific Terms

One problem with addressing an audience of programmers from different languages is that in many cases the terminology for various OOP or .NET constructs differs from language to language. And since we have to use some terminology in the book, there's no way to avoid some language bias here, as well as the risk that developers from other languages might not be familiar with the terms used. In this book, we'll generally adopt C# terminology, in accordance with our decision to present most code samples in C#.