A language in the key of C#.(Company Business and Marketing)

The covers are off. The language specs are available for inspection. The C# (that's 'C sharp') language has been delivered to the world. Microsoft's avowed intent is for the OO-based language to provide a better balance between power and productivity than C and C++ (upon which it's based).

For use in conjunction with Microsoft's new, Web service-providing .NET platform (see this month's Visual Basic column), it is RAD with access to the underlying platform. The Internet figures largely, too, as you might suspect Using relatively straightforward language constructs, the components that are developed can be converted into Web services, allowing them to be invoked across the Internet (from any language running on any operating system, is the Microsoft assertion).

In terms of the Internet, a Web services framework can make services appear as native C# objects, allowing you to use them in an OO manner. For XML, C# allows XML data to be mapped directly into a struct as an efficient way to handle small amounts of data Related to this, the C# language allows for typed metadata that can be applied to any object Basically, there is intended to betight coupling between domain-specific metadata and program code.

In terms of coding practices, the design of C# intends to eliminate some of the common C++ programming errors. For example, variables in C# are automatically initialised by the ...