Summary

In this chapter, we discussed some of the advantages of C#—namely, that

• C# is an intuitive OO programming language that improves upon many languages that preceded it.

• C# was designed from the ground up to be fully object-oriented.

• C# is part of, and hence has access to the power of, Microsoft's .NET Framework.

• C# can be downloaded for free from the MSDN web site.

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Of course, we haven't sung all of C#'s praises in this chapter; there are many other features that make C# a powerful object-oriented programming language that we'll cover in subsequent chapters.

In addition to exploring some of the advantages of C#, we also introduced you to some basic elements of C# syntax. In particular, we

• Presented the anatomy of a simple C# program

• Discussed the predefined simple types and the string type

• Examined how value type variables are declared and initialized

• Introduced how a value of one type can be cast into a different type

• Discussed arithmetic, assignment, and logical expressions

• Presented loops and other flow of control structures available with C#

• Explored how to define blocks of code and the concept of variable scope

• Learned how to print text messages to the console with the Write and WriteLine methods

• Discussed some basic elements of good C# programming style

There's a lot more to learn about C#—things we'll need to know in building the Student Registration System application in Part Three of the book—but we need to explain a number of basic object concepts first. So, on to Chapter 2!