C# a new era

C# (pronounced C Sharp) is a multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses functional, imperative, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was developed by Microsoft as part of the .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by ECMA (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270). C# is one of the 44 programming languages supported by the .NET Framework's Common Language Runtime.
C# is intended to be a simple, modern, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. Anders Hejlsberg, the designer of Borland's Object Pascal language, leads the team which is developing C#. It has an object-oriented syntax based on C++ and is heavily influenced by other programming languages such as Delphi and Java. It was initially named Cool, which stood for "C like Object Oriented Language". However, in July 2000, when Microsoft made the project public, the name of the programming language was given as C#. The most recent version of the language is 3.0 which was released in conjunction with the .NET Framework 3.5 in 2007. The next proposed version, 4.0, is in development.

History:

In 1996, Sun Microsystems released the Java programming language with Microsoft soon purchasing a license to implement it in their operating system. Java was originally meant to be a platform independent language, but Microsoft, in their implementation, broke their license agreement and made a few changes that would essentially inhibit Java's platform-independent capabilities. Sun filed a lawsuit and Microsoft settled, deciding to create their own version of a partially compiled, partially interpreted object-oriented programming language with syntax closely related to that of C++.
During the development of .NET Framework, the class libraries were originally written in a language/compiler called Simple Managed C (SMC).[2][3][4] 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".[5] 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, 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. Some argue that C# shares roots in other languages.[6]

Language Name:

The 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.[27] This is similar to the language name of C++, where the ++ symbol indicates that a variable should be incremented by 1.
Due to technical limitations of display (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.[28] This convention is reflected in the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification.[29] However, when it is practical to do so (for example, in advertising or in box art[30]), Microsoft will use the intended musical sharp 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#.[31] The original implementation of Eiffel for .NET was called Eiffel# [3], a name since retired since the full Eiffel language is now supported. The suffix is also sometimes 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).

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)