In simple terms, programming is the art of writing a set of commands that instruct a computer to execute a particular task. In the early days, programming capabilities were limited due to memory and speed restrictions. Due to this, programmers wrote crude and simple tasks that did elementary jobs. With time and with more enhancements, people started writing programs in procedural languages such as COBOL. 

Although the languages did the work, the programs had some limitations. There was not much scope for writing reusable components or design patterns that could be used in different places in the application. Hence, the applications were difficult to maintain and scalability was a challenge. 

As a result, efforts were made to develop high-level programming languages that could overcome all such challenges faced by procedural languages. With time, many different programming languages were devised. C was developed between 1972 and 1973. At the time, it was a low-level procedural language that depended upon the underlying platform, such as Linux or Windows. C also did not fully utilize the concept of object-oriented programming (which we will go through in Chapter 3, Understanding Object-Oriented Programming). 

C++ was introduced in 1998, and provided programmers with the ability to effectively use the concepts of object-oriented programming while still retaining the machine-level programming features provided by C. In this book, we will go through the different aspects of programming in C#. While retaining the OOP capabilities of C++, C# allows us to write programs independent of the underlying hardware implementation.

In this chapter, we will go over the basics of C#. We will review its underlying fundamentals and dive deep into the .NET Framework architecture. We will learn how common language runtime works to translate the application code to machine-level code. We will learn how C# is both different and similar to other languages, such as C and C++. We will then learn about the different components in a C# program, such as classes, namespaces, and assemblies. And, as a common tradition for any new language, we will look at the implementation of a Hello World program.

This chapter consists of the following topics:

• Comparing C# with C and C++
• .NET Framework
• .NET Framework release versions
• Visual Studio for C# 
• Basic structure of C#
• Creating a basic program in C#