Preface

Every 10 years or so, a new technology arrives that changes the way we think about application development. In the early 1980s, the new technologies were Unix, which could be run on a desktop, and a powerful new language called C, developed by AT&T. The early '90s brought Windows and C++. Each development represented a sea change in the way we approached programming. In 2000, .NET and C# were the next wave, and .NET 2.0 completes the transition.

Microsoft has "bet the company" on .NET. When a company of its size and influence spends billions of dollars and reorganizes its entire corporate structure to support a new platform, programmers take notice. It turns out that .NET represents a major change in the way you'll think about programming. It is, in short, a new development platform designed to facilitate object-oriented Internet development. The programming language of choice for this platform is C#, which builds on the lessons learned from C (high performance), C++ (object-oriented structure), Java© (garbage collection, high security), and Visual Basic (rapid development) to create a new language ideally suited for developing component-based, n-tier distributed web applications.

C# 2.0, the language of choice for .NET 2005, comes with updated tools and a powerful new development environment. It is the crowning achievement of Microsoft's R&D investment. It is wicked cool.