I had the opportunity to play around with Microsoft’s C# and I must admit it’s a breeze (and fun) to learn if you’ve got a C++/C, Pascal or Java background. Obviously, Microsoft’s C# designers took the best of many worlds, which means, the best of all the programming languages above.
This is no surprise if you know who’s the principal lead architect of C#: Anders Heylsberg. Yes, it’s that guy who happened to be the main designer of Turbo Pascal and who shook the computer industry when he decided to leave Borland for Microsoft (there are plenty of rumours around that Hejlsberg was working on C# at Borland, but these might or might not be true. Here at xsamplex, we’ll leave that to the readers to figure out).
There’s a couple of catch-on’s I don’t specifically like about VS 2005: from its original release it was obviously targeted to compile for Framework 2.0 only. I can only assume that Microsoft wants their faithful developers to force their companies to move to the Framework 2: In the practical world, this makes no sense since most Windows based servers and desktops don’t necessarily come with Dot Net 2.0 installed (that’s an understatement).
Secondly, the IDE is extremely giddy and doesn’t seem to work completely for me: The actual coding area looks so small that it proves the point that in some cases MDI does work (in this case editing code).