7 Things about C#: The Platform

C# runs on .NET, a cross-platform, managed, and open-source environment. The following 7 features give you an overview of this platform and explains a few of it’s more notable features. When completed, you’ll have a better understanding of .NET, its benefits, and how C# fits in.

The C# Platform

1 — Is a general-purpose language

As a general purpose language, C# is a multi-use tool that you can use on a wide variety of applications. I’ve personally used it to build apps for the cloud, desktop, mobile, server, and web. In more recent scenarios, people use C# for AI in the areas of chatbots, neural nets, machine learning, and natural language processing. As WebAssembly has upset JavaScript’s predominance of the browser, you can now write browser-based applications with C# via a new .NET technology known as Blazor. You can also build HTTP APIs for any developer from any other language and platform to use.

C# can be used to build many different types of applications.

Speaking about other languages, the next section discusses .NET’s multi-language support.

2 — One of many .NET languages

.NET was born as a multi-language platform. Its inception introduced a handful of Microsoft supported languages, including C#, J#, JScript, Managed C++, and Visual Basic. JScript was a JavaScript-based language that is no longer supported. J# was Java for .NET and is also no longer supported. Visual Basic served as the bridge for the millions of VB developers to move to the .NET Framework, though it’s fully object oriented and has no true backwards compatibility. Managed C++ served the C++ developer base who needed clean integration with their existing code. C#, having it’s roots in the C and C++ family of languages was built natively for .NET and is arguably the most widely .NET language used today. A few years ago, Microsoft Research created the F# programming language, which has seen success in financial and scientific computing, but is well suited to other general purpose implementations.

Note: Although the primary syntax for C# comes from the C and C++ family, C# incorporates features from several different languages of the past…