C# (pronounced "see sharp") is a multi-paradigm programming language encompassing imperative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was developed by Microsoft within the .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270). C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language Infrastructure.

C# is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language.[3] Its development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg, the designer of Borland's Turbo Pascal, who has said that its object-oriented syntax is based on C++ and other languages.[4] James Gosling, who created the Java programming language in 1994, called it an 'imitation' of that language.[5] The most recent version is C# 3.0, which was released in conjunction with the .NET Framework 3.5 in 2007. The next proposed version, 4.0, is in development.
Design goals
The Ecma standard lists these design goals for C#:[3]

C# language is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language.
The language, and implementations thereof, should provide support for software engineering principles such as strong type checking, array bounds checking, detection of attempts to use uninitialized variables, and automatic garbage collection. Software robustness, durability, and programmer productivity are important.
The language is intended for use in developing software components suitable for deployment in distributed environments.
Source code portability is very important, as is programmer portability, especially for those programmers already familiar with C and C++.
Support for internationalization is very important.
C# is intended to be suitable for writing applications for both hosted and embedded systems, ranging from the very large that use sophisticated operating systems, down to the very small having dedicated functions.
Although C# applications are intended to be economical with regard to memory and processing power requirements, the language was not intended to compete directly on performance and size with C or assembly language.
[edit] Language name

C sharp typographical convention
C-sharp musical noteThe name "C sharp" was inspired from musical notation where a sharp indicates that the written note should be made a half-step higher in pitch.[6] This is similar to the language name of C++, where "++" indicates that a variable should be incremented by 1. The sharp symbol also resembles a ligature of four "+" symbols (in a two-by-two grid), further implying that the language is an increment of C++.

Due to technical limitations of display (standard fonts, browsers, etc.) and the fact that the sharp symbol (♯, U+266F, MUSIC SHARP SIGN) is not present on the standard keyboard, the number sign (#, U+0023, NUMBER SIGN) was chosen to represent the sharp symbol in the written name of the programming language.[7] This convention is reflected in the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification.[3] However, when it is practical to do so (for example, in advertising or in box art[8]), Microsoft uses the intended musical symbol.

The "sharp" suffix has been used by a number of other .NET languages that are variants of existing languages, including J# (a .NET language also designed by Microsoft which is derived from Java 1.1), A# (from Ada), and the functional F#.[9] The original implementation of Eiffel for .NET was called Eiffel#,[10] a name since retired since the full Eiffel language is now supported. The suffix has also been used for libraries, such as Gtk# (a .NET wrapper for GTK+ and other GNOME libraries), Cocoa# (a wrapper for Cocoa) and Qt# (a .NET language binding for the Qt toolkit).

[edit] History
During the development of .NET Framework, the class libraries were originally written using a managed code compiler system called Simple Managed C (SMC).[11][12][13] In January 1999, Anders Hejlsberg formed a team to build a new language at the time called Cool, which stood for "C-like Object Oriented Language".[14] Microsoft had considered keeping the name "Cool" as the final name of the language, but chose not to do so for trademark reasons. By the time the .NET project was publicly announced at the July 2000 Professional Developers Conference, the language had been renamed C#, and the class libraries and ASP.NET runtime had been ported to C#.

C#'s principal designer and lead architect at Microsoft is Anders Hejlsberg, who was previously involved with the design of Turbo Pascal, Embarcadero Delphi (formerly CodeGear Delphi and Borland Delphi), and Visual J++. In interviews and technical papers he has stated that flaws in most major programming languages (e.g. C++, Java, Delphi, and Smalltalk) drove the fundamentals of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which, in turn, drove the design of the C# programming language itself.

[edit] Versions
In the course of its development, the C# language has gone through several versions:

Version Language Specification Microsoft Compiler
C# 1.0 December 2001 January 2002
C# 2.0 December 2002 November 2005
C# 3.0 June 2005 November 2006
C# 4.0 June 2006 in development