Take the 2-minute tour ×

When Microsoft presented .NET Framework and C# language in 2002, what was the first article to introduce C#?

I'm looking for some paper published on MSDN or Microsoft website that would explain the need for another language, talk some background and maybe have some code samples.

Also, I'm interested in the original C# introduction, not in a generic .NET Framework document.

I remember that early .NET papers were rather foggy and while it is a fair share of fun to re-read them, I aim for a language-centric document.

share|improve this question

closed as off-topic by gnat, MichaelT, GlenH7, Dan Pichelman, Bart van Ingen Schenau Oct 13 '13 at 10:38



3 Answers 3

up vote 10 down vote accepted

From MSDN Magazine September 2000

I've an odd - 11 year old - feeling that I read this at the time, and went . . . meh

Many developers wish there was a language that was easy to write, read, and maintain like Visual Basic, but that still provided the power and flexibility of C++. For those developers, the new C# language is here. Microsoft has built C# with type-safety, garbage collection, simplified type declarations, versioning and scalability support, and lots of other features that make developing solutions faster and easier, especially for COM+ and Web Services. This article gives you a first look at C#, a language you are

C# is Cool September 2000

Also, good article On the History of .Net & C# here by James Kovacs

share|improve this answer
Wow, this definitely is Cool. Thanks. –  Dan Aug 8 '11 at 16:57
IIRC, Cool was a code name for C# :-) –  Kate Gregory Aug 8 '11 at 17:04
@Kate: Indeed; it stood for "C-like Object Oriented Language". However that was not the first code name for what eventually became C#; the first code name was "SafeC". –  Eric Lippert Aug 17 '11 at 22:56

There's also Cristoph Wille's Introducing C#.

It's fairly light reading, and kind of nostalgic in the sense that the underlying platform was still called the Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS).

share|improve this answer

The Wikipedia article is a good start.

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[citation needed] 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# language itself.

If you do find a reference you could update the wikipedia article. ;p

share|improve this answer
Yeah, I know where the language came from—I'm now particularly interested in the way Microsoft presented it when it came out. I remember there have been a number of rants about C# being ripped off from Java so I'm curious how they first presented it to the public the first time. –  Dan Aug 8 '11 at 14:43
