Mads Torgersen is the Program Manager for the C# language at Microsoft, where he runs the day-to-day language design process and maintains the language specification.

Scott Wiltamuth is Director of Program Management for the Visual Studio Professional team at Microsoft Corporation. At Microsoft, he has worked on a wide range of development tools, including OLE Automation, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript, JScript, Visual J++, and Visual C#.

Peter Golde was the lead developer of the original Microsoft 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. He is currently an architect at Microsoft working on compilers.

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

1.1 Hello, World 3

1.2 Program Structure 4

1.3 Types and Variables 6

1.4 Expressions 13

1.5 Statements 16

1.6 Classes and Objects 21

1.7 Structs 50

1.8 Arrays 53

1.9 Interfaces 56

1.10 Enums 58

1.11 Delegates 60

1.12 Attributes 61

Chapter 2: Lexical Structure 65

2.1 Programs 65

2.2 Grammars 65

2.3 Lexical Analysis 67

2.4 Tokens 71

2.5 Preprocessing Directives 85

Chapter 3: Basic Concepts 99

3.1 Application Start-up 99

3.2 Application Termination 100

3.3 Declarations 101

3.4 Members 105

3.5 Member Access 107

3.6 Signatures and Overloading 117

3.7 Scopes 120

3.8 Namespace and Type Names 127

3.9 Automatic Memory Management 132

3.10 Execution Order 137

Chapter 4: Types 139

4.1 Value Types 140

4.2 Reference Types 152

4.3 Boxing and Unboxing 155

4.4 Constructed Types 160

4.5 Type Parameters 164

4.6 Expression Tree Types 165

4.7 The dynamic Type 166

Chapter 5: Variables 169

5.1 Variable Categories 169

5.2 Default Values 175

5.3 Definite Assignment 176

5.4 Variable References 192

5.5 Atomicity of Variable References 193

Chapter 6: Conversions 195

6.1 Implicit Conversions 196

6.2 Explicit Conversions 204

6.3 Standard Conversions 213

6.4 User-Defined Conversions 214

6.5 Anonymous Function Conversions 219

6.6 Method Group Conversions 226

Chapter 7: Expressions 231

7.1 Expression Classifications 231

7.2 Static and Dynamic Binding 234

7.3 Operators 238

7.4 Member Lookup 247

7.5 Function Members 250

7.6 Primary Expressions 278

7.7 Unary Operators 326

7.8 Arithmetic Operators 331

7.9 Shift Operators 343

7.10 Relational and Type-Testing Operators 344

7.11 Logical Operators 355

7.12 Conditional Logical Operators 358

7.13 The Null Coalescing Operator 360

7.14 Conditional Operator 361

7.15 Anonymous Function Expressions 364

7.16 Query Expressions 373

7.17 Assignment Operators 389

7.18 Expression 395

7.19 Constant Expressions 395

7.20 Boolean Expressions 397

Chapter 8: Statements 399

8.1 End Points and Reachability 400

8.2 Blocks 402

8.3 The Empty Statement 404

8.4 Labeled Statements 406

8.5 Declaration Statements 407

8.6 Expression Statements 412

8.7 Selection Statements 413

8.8 Iteration Statements 420

8.9 Jump Statements 429

8.10 The try Statement 438

8.11 The checked and unchecked Statements 443

8.12 The lock Statement 443

8.13 The using Statement 445

8.14 The yield Statement 449

Chapter 9: Namespaces 453

9.1 Compilation Units 453

9.2 Namespace Declarations 454

9.3 Extern Aliases 456

9.4 Using Directives 457

9.5 Namespace Members 463

9.6 Type Declarations 464

9.7 Namespace Alias Qualifiers 464

Chapter 10: Classes 467

10.1 Class Declarations 467

10.2 Partial Types 481

10.3 Class Members 490

10.4 Constants 506

10.5 Fields 509

10.6 Methods 520

10.7 Properties 545

10.8 Events 559

10.9 Indexers 566

10.10 Operators 571

10.11 Instance Constructors 579

10.12 Static Constructors 586

10.13 Destructors 589

10.14 Iterators 592

Chapter 11: Structs 607

11.1 Struct Declarations 608

11.2 Struct Members 609

11.3 Class and Struct Differences 610

11.4 Struct Examples 619

Chapter 12: Arrays 625

12.1 Array Types 625

12.2 Array Creation 628

12.3 Array Element Access 628

12.4 Array Members 628

12.5 Array Covariance 629

12.6 Array Initializers 630

Chapter 13: Interfaces 633

13.1 Interface Declarations 633

13.2 Interface Members 639

13.3 Fully Qualified Interface Member Names 645

13.4 Interface Implementations 645

Chapter 14: Enums 663

14.1 Enum Declarations 663

14.2 Enum Modifiers 664

14.3 Enum Members 665

14.4 The System.Enum Type 668

14.5 Enum Values and Operations 668

Chapter 15: Delegates 671

15.1 Delegate Declarations 672

15.2 Delegate Compatibility 676

15.3 Delegate Instantiation 676

15.4 Delegate Invocation 677

Chapter 16: Exceptions 681

16.1 Causes of Exceptions 683

16.2 The System.Exception Class 683

16.3 How Exceptions Are Handled 684

16.4 Common Exception Classes 685

Chapter 17: Attributes 687

17.1 Attribute Classes 688

17.2 Attribute Specification 692

17.3 Attribute Instances 698

17.4 Reserved Attributes 699

17.5 Attributes for Interoperation 707

Chapter 18: Unsafe Code 709

18.1 Unsafe Contexts 710

18.2 Pointer Types 713

18.3 Fixed and Moveable Variables 716

18.4 Pointer Conversions 717

18.5 Pointers in Expressions 720

18.6 The fixed Statement 728

18.7 Fixed-Size Buffers 733

18.8 Stack Allocation 736

18.9 Dynamic Memory Allocation 738

Appendix A: Documentation Comments 741

A.1 Introduction 741

A.2 Recommended Tags 743

A.3 Processing the Documentation File 754

A.4 An Example 760

Appendix B: Grammar 767

B.1 Lexical Grammar 767

B.2 Syntactic Grammar 777

B.3 Grammar Extensions for Unsafe Code 809

Appendix C: References 813

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