The C# Programming Language

Anders Hejlsberg is a programming legend. He is the architect of the C# language and a Microsoft Technical Fellow. He joined Microsoft in 1996, following a 13-year career at Borland, where he was the chief architect of Delphi and Turbo Pascal.   Mads Torgersen is a senior program manager at Microsoft. As the program manager for the C# language, he runs the C# language design meetings and maintains the C# language specification. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2005, Mads was an associate professor at the University of Aarhus, teaching and researching object-oriented programming languages. There, he led the group that designed and implemented generic wildcards for the Java Programming Language.   Scott Wiltamuth is partner program manager for Visual Studio. While at Microsoft, he has worked on a wide range of developer-oriented projects, including Visual Basic, VBScript, JScript, Visual J++, and Visual C#. Scott is one of the designers of the C# language, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Stanford University.   Before leaving Microsoft, Peter Golde served as the lead developer of Microsoft’s C# compiler. As the primary Microsoft representative on the ECMA committee that standardized C#, he led the implementation of the compiler and worked on the language design.

Foreword xi

Preface xiii

About the Authors xv

About the Annotators xvii



 

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

1.1 Hello, World 2

1.2 Program Structure 4

1.3 Types and Variables 6

1.4 Expressions 10

1.5 Statements 13

1.6 Classes and Objects 18

1.7 Structs 41

1.8 Arrays 43

1.9 Interfaces 46

1.10 Enums 48

1.11 Delegates 49

1.12 Attributes 53

 

Chapter 2: Lexical Structure 55

2.1 Programs 55

2.2 Grammars 55

2.3 Lexical Analysis 57

2.4 Tokens 61

2.5 Preprocessing Directives 74

 

Chapter 3: Basic Concepts 87

3.1 Application Start-Up 87

3.2 Application Termination 88

3.3 Declarations 89

3.4 Members 92

3.5 Member Access 95

3.6 Signatures and Overloading 104

3.7 Scopes 106

3.8 Namespace and Type Names 112

3.9 Automatic Memory Management 116

3.10 Execution Order 121

 

Chapter 4: Types 123

4.1 Value Types 124

4.2 Reference Types 135

4.3 Boxing and Unboxing 137

4.4 Constructed Types 141

4.5 Type Parameters 145

4.6 Expression Tree Types 146

 

Chapter 5: Variables 149

5.1 Variable Categories 149

5.2 Default Values 154

5.3 Definite Assignment 155

5.4 Variable References 171

5.5 Atomicity of Variable References 172

 

Chapter 6: Conversions 173

6.1 Implicit Conversions 174

6.2 Explicit Conversions 180

6.3 Standard Conversions 188

6.4 User-Defined Conversions 188

6.5 Anonymous Function Conversions 193

6.6 Method Group Conversions 200

 

Chapter 7: Expressions 203

7.1 Expression Classifications 203

7.2 Operators 206

7.3 Member Lookup 214

7.4 Function Members 217

7.5 Primary Expressions 238

7.6 Unary Operators 280

7.7 Arithmetic Operators 285

7.8 Shift Operators 295

7.9 Relational and Type-Testing Operators 297

7.10 Logical Operators 307

7.11 Conditional Logical Operators 309

7.12 The Null Coalescing Operator 311

7.13 Conditional Operator 313

7.14 Anonymous Function Expressions 314

7.15 Query Expressions 324

7.16 Assignment Operators 339

7.17 Expressions 344

7.18 Constant Expressions 344

7.19 Boolean Expressions 346

 

Chapter 8: Statements 347

8.1 End Points and Reachability 348

8.2 Blocks 350

8.3 The Empty Statement 351

8.4 Labeled Statements 352

8.5 Declaration Statements 353

8.6 Expression Statements 357

8.7 Selection Statements 358

8.8 Iteration Statements 364

8.9 Jump Statements 373

8.10 The try Statement 380

8.11 The checked and unchecked Statements 385

8.12 The lock Statement 385

8.13 The using Statement 387

8.14 The yield Statement 390

 

Chapter 9: Namespaces 393

9.1 Compilation Units 393

9.2 Namespace Declarations 394

9.3 Extern Aliases 395

9.4 Using Directives 396

9.5 Namespace Members 403

9.6 Type Declarations 403

9.7 Namespace Alias Qualifiers 404

 

Chapter 10: Classes 407

10.1 Class Declarations 407

10.2 Partial Types 420

10.3 Class Members 429

10.4 Constants 443

10.5 Fields 445

10.6 Methods 455

10.7 Properties 478

10.8 Events 491

10.9 Indexers 498

10.10 Operators 503

10.11 Instance Constructors 510

10.12 Static Constructors 518

10.13 Destructors 520

10.14 Iterators 522

 

Chapter 11: Structs 537

11.1 Struct Declarations 537

11.2 Struct Members 539

11.3 Class and Struct Differences 539

11.4 Struct Examples 547

 

Chapter 12: Arrays 553

12.1 Array Types 553

12.2 Array Creation 555

12.3 Array Element Access 556

12.4 Array Members 556

12.5 Array Covariance 556

12.6 Array Initializers 557

 

Chapter 13: Interfaces 561

13.1 Interface Declarations 561

13.2 Interface Members 564

13.3 Fully Qualified Interface Member Names 569

13.4 Interface Implementations 570

 

Chapter 14: Enums 585

14.1 Enum Declarations 585

14.2 Enum Modifiers 586

14.3 Enum Members 586

14.4 The System.Enum Type 589

14.5 Enum Values and Operations 590

 

Chapter 15: Delegates 591

15.1 Delegate Declarations 592

15.2 Delegate Compatibility 595

15.3 Delegate Instantiation 595

15.4 Delegate Invocation 596

 

Chapter 16: Exceptions 599

16.1 Causes of Exceptions 599

16.2 The System.Exception Class 600

16.3 How Exceptions Are Handled 600

16.4 Common Exception Classes 601

 

Chapter 17: Attributes 603

17.1 Attribute Classes 603

17.2 Attribute Specification 607

17.3 Attribute Instances 613

17.4 Reserved Attributes 615

17.5 Attributes for Interoperation 621

 

Chapter 18: Unsafe Code 623

18.1 Unsafe Contexts 624

18.2 Pointer Types 627

18.3 Fixed and Moveable Variables 630

18.4 Pointer Conversions 631

18.5 Pointers in Expressions 633

18.6 The fixed Statement 640

18.7 Fixed-Size Buffers 645

18.8 Stack Allocation 648

18.9 Dynamic Memory Allocation 649

 

Appendix A: Documentation Comments 653

A.1 Introduction 653

A.2 Recommended Tags 655

A.3 Processing the Documentation File 666

A.4 An Example 672

 

Appendix B: Grammar 679

B.1 Lexical Grammar 679

B.2 Syntactic Grammar 689

B.3 Grammar Extensions for Unsafe Code 720

 

Appendix C: References 725

 

Index 727