When it was introduced, C# came as a breath of fresh air at just the right time. It is a modern object oriented language, which takes the best qualities of many that came before it. Low-level power with just-in-time compilation, the simplicity of a garbage collected environment, and the flexibility of runtime that allows for easy interoperability with other languages, not to mention a great base class library, thriving open source community, and the ability to target multiple platforms make C# a compelling option.
In this chapter, we discussed setting up your development environment and downloading all of the relevant tools and runtimes:
- Visual Studio, both commercial and free options.
- Command line, useful for plugging directly into automated tools that use shell commands.
- SharpDevelop, an open source alternative to Visual Studio.
- MonoDevelop, the official IDE of the open source implementation of the .NET Framework and C#. This allows you to target multiple platforms.
Once you have chosen a preferred development environment, and followed the steps detailed in this chapter, you will be ready to go through the rest of the book and all of the samples contained therein.
In the next chapter, we will talk about the evolution of the language, which, in turn, will help you understand the feature that was introduced along the way and contributes to where we stand today with C# 5.0.