Book Image

Learn C# Programming

By : Marius Bancila, Raffaele Rialdi, Ankit Sharma
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn C# Programming

5 (1)
By: Marius Bancila, Raffaele Rialdi, Ankit Sharma

Overview of this book

The C# programming language is often developers’ primary choice for creating a wide range of applications for desktop, cloud, and mobile. In nearly two decades of its existence, C# has evolved from a general-purpose, object-oriented language to a multi-paradigm language with impressive features. This book will take you through C# from the ground up in a step-by-step manner. You'll start with the building blocks of C#, which include basic data types, variables, strings, arrays, operators, control statements, and loops. Once comfortable with the basics, you'll then progress to learning object-oriented programming concepts such as classes and structures, objects, interfaces, and abstraction. Generics, functional programming, dynamic, and asynchronous programming are covered in detail. This book also takes you through regular expressions, reflection, memory management, pattern matching, exceptions, and many other advanced topics. As you advance, you'll explore the .NET Core 3 framework and learn how to use the dotnet command-line interface (CLI), consume NuGet packages, develop for Linux, and migrate apps built with .NET Framework. Finally, you'll understand how to run unit tests with the Microsoft unit testing frameworks available in Visual Studio. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with the essentials of the C# language and be ready to start creating apps with it.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Using the dynamic type

Throughout this book, we have talked about the CLR. .NET Framework, however, contains another component called the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). This is another runtime environment that adds a set of services on top of the CLR to enable dynamic languages to run on the CLR and to add dynamic features to statically-typed languages. C# and Visual Basic are statically-typed languages. By contrast, languages such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Smalltalk, Lua, and others are dynamic languages. The key characteristic of these languages is that they identify the type of an object at runtime and not at compile time as in the case of the statically-typed languages.

The DLR provides C# (and Visual Basic) with dynamic features that enable them to interoperate with dynamic languages in a simple manner. As mentioned before, the DLR adds a set of services to the CLR. These services are as follows:

  • Expression trees are used to present language semantics. These...