Subtitles of the Movie

Let's start off here with a little history of C# for those of you who are totally new to this neighborhood. Now, this course is going to cover the C# language and there's a couple of things you need to understand about this and a lot of this information is kind of good for kind of water cooler talk if you're new to the development environment. You can kind of look a little knowledgeable and you can kind of act like you've been around here longer than you have maybe but a lot of this is really fascinating and interesting and it gives you an idea of what's trying to be accomplished here with C#. First of all, notice this thing was born in January 1999. Now, that was just ten years ago. Now, that's a long time in the information technology world but from a language standpoint, that's not very old. Now, what brought about C#? Well, the design goals, when Microsoft decided that they wanted to kind of go back and redesign and create their own programming language again; because keep in mind, about this time they had Visual Basic out there. I think it was like VB 6 and it was quite simply the most successful programming language and platform in the world but they could see that with the onslaught of the Internet, that things were about to change and so their design goals for this new language was that first of all it should be simple. Now, if you're coming from an old, non-C environment, you're going to ask where is the simplicity and trust me. It's here. It's just different from what you've been seeing but you will like it. Most people that I've seen take their first look at C#, a lot of students in live classrooms, they complain and they moan about wow, this is so different. Wow, this is just kind of weird and by the end of the week, they're really into C Sharp and they like it. So trust me. It is simple. It was built with modern, make that distributed environment characteristic in mind because we're no longer assuming that our program's going to run on a bunch of networked, highly-secure computers with constant connections. OK? And so C# was designed around that. It's also designed to be a general-purpose language. It's not really pinpointing any particular aspect, kind of like Perl or any of that stuff was. It is truly object-oriented and this, if you're coming from a non-C language, this will get your attention. It is totally object-oriented and it's also component oriented. Now, the syntax of C# is based on C++. Now, the C languages have been around for a while and I want you to notice something here; that this thing was originally code named or they originally decided that they would name this new language Cool; C-o-o-l. That's kind of hard for a person from the south to say. Normally we would say Kewel, but I'm trying to do a little bit more Midwestern thing here. Cool and that stood for C-like object-oriented language and clearly the goal for Microsoft was to take all the strengths of the C languages that were out there, C, C++, Java, all those C-based languages. They had an incredible amount of power but the idea was let's take a look at these languages and let's see what we can do to kind of tweak them a little bit and build them for the environment we find ourselves in now and let's make it even better. Now, a little bit later on they changed the name to C# because there was going to be some trademark issues with the name Cool and so that got changed. Now, there is a clear musical connotation here and there's some marketing stuff that they really haven't capitalized on but you can see it here, no pun intended and C# really means and if any of you guys are musicians you'll know that C# is a half-step or a semi-tone above C and this language was designed to be maybe a half-step or just a little better than basic C or C++. Now, I can hear some of you yelling at the monitor about how this is not so, but trust me. From a functional standpoint, in a general sense, this is a lot easier for people to get their head around and still do some pretty powerful things with it. So now the current version of C# that's out there right now that we're going to work in was actually released as part of the .NET Framework 3.5 release back in 2007 and just to kind of give you a little teaser, the next version is going to be part of the Visual Studio 2010 product and the .NET Framework 4.0, which is coming out at some point in the future and you can actually go out there and start to look at Visual Studio 2010 and this stuff. I think it's in beta mode right now. I'm not really sure but anyway, you can kind of go play with that if you would like to. Most people's real-world experience is to leave the stuff alone until its final version has been out there a while. But anyway, that's kind of where we're headed and where we've been. You're going to find C to be very user friendly, to be very logical. Those of you who are coming from the old VB world are going to find it to be quite different. OK? So that's kind of a history of C and where it came from. Not a lot of history there; only ten years and we're just now to version 3.0 so the good thing here, there's not a whole lot of catching up you have to do to learn this language. So just wanted to give you a real short history of C so that you could look knowledgeable and feel a little bit more comfortable in the neighborhood.