John Sharp - Microsoft Visual C# 2013 Step by Step

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Microsoft Visual C# is a powerful but simple language aimed primarily at developers creating applications by using the Microsoft .NET Framework. It inherits many of the best features of C++ and Microsoft Visual Basic, but few of the inconsistencies and anachronisms, resulting in a cleaner and more logical language. C# 1.0 made its public debut in 2001. The advent of C# 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005 saw several important new features added to the language, including generics, iterators, and anonymous methods. C# 3.0, which was released with Visual Studio 2008, added extension methods, lambda expressions, and most famously of all, the Language-Integrated Query facility, or LINQ. C# 4.0, released in 2010, provided further enhancements that improve its interoperability with other languages and technologies. These features included support for named and optional arguments, and the dynamic type, which indicates that the language runtime should implement late binding for an object. An important addition in the .NET Framework released concurrently with C# 4.0 was the classes and types that constitute the Task Parallel Library (TPL). Using the TPL, you can build highly scalable applications that can take full advantage of multicore processors quickly and easily. C# 5.0 adds native support for asynchronous task-based processing through the async method modifier and the await operator.

Another key event for Microsoft has been the launch of Windows 8. This new version of Windows supports highly interactive applications that can share data and collaborate with each other as well as connect to services running in the cloud. The development environment provided by Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 made all these powerful features easy to use, and the many new wizards and enhancements included in Visual Studio 2012 can greatly improve your productivity as a developer.

After listening to feedback from developers, Microsoft modified some aspects of the way in which the user interface works and released a technical preview of Windows 8.1 containing these changes. At the same time, Microsoft released a preview edition of Visual Studio 2013, containing incremental changes to Visual Studio 2012 and adding new features that help to further improve programmer productivity. Although many of the updates to Visual Studio are small, and there have been no changes to the C# language in this release, we felt that the modifications to the way in which Windows 8.1 handles the user interface would make it beneficial to perform a similar incremental update to this book. The result is this volume.