About this site, and C# in Depth

Welcome to the companion web site to C# in Depth.

C# in Depth is a book for those who are passionate about C#. It aims to be a bridge between the existing introductory books and the language specification: something readable but detailed, exploring every aspect of the language from version 2 onwards. In the interests of brevity, it doesn't spend much time on C# 1 - readers are already expected to know the first version at least reasonably. Every new feature from C# 2 onwards is covered, however, as shown in the table of contents below.

One of my hobbies is helping other developers on sites such as Stack Overflow. before Stack Overflow came along, I used to post a lot on the C# newsgroups. I've come to appreciate that whatever technologies you might use on top of C# - MVC, WPF, Windows Forms, etc - if you don't have a firm grasp of the language, you'll find it a lot harder. My hope is that C# in Depth helps readers to really "grok" the language, so they feel they're working in tandem with the compiler rather than fighting against it; making the most of new features instead of constantly being caught out by subtle "gotcha" behaviour.

Table of Contents (4th edition)

• Part 1: C# in context
  • 1: Survival of the sharpest
• Part 2: C# 2-5
  • 2: C# 2
  • 3: C# 3: LINQ and everything that comes with it
  • 4: C# 4: Improving interoperability
  • 5: Writing asynchronous code
  • 6: Async implementation
  • 7: C# 5 bonus features
• Part 3: C# 6
  • 8: Super-sleek properties and expression-bodied members
  • 9: Stringy features
  • 10: A smörgåsbord of features for concise code
• Part 4: C# 7 and beyond
  • 11: Composition using tuples
  • 12: Deconstruction and pattern matching
  • 13: Improving efficiency with more pass by reference
  • 14: Concise code in C# 7
  • 15: C# 8 and beyond
• Appendix: Language features by version