Intoduction to VS 2005 and C#

The .NET platform is a development framework that provides a new way to create Windows applications. However, .NET goes beyond traditional Windows programming to facilitate creating web applications quickly and easily.Its goal was to radically reduce the amount of boilerplate code you have to write, and to make the creation of web and desktop applications easier by "encapsulating" much of the "plumbing" of a typical application in objects, likes code to connect to databases, the Internet, or your filesystem, .NET provides fully tested controls that you can drag onto your form.
The Framework specifies how .NET programming constructs such as intrinsic types, classes, and interfaces are implemented.The most important components of the Framework are the Common Language Runtime (CLR), described in the preceding section, and the Framework Class Library (FCL ), which provides an enormous number of predefined types or classes for you to use in your programs.
C# was created specifically for .NET. Although .NET may become cross-platform some day soonthere already exists a working open-source Unix versionfor now, the overwhelming majority of .NET programs will be written to run on a machine running one of the Windows operating systems.
The C# language is disarmingly simple, but C# is highly expressive when it comes to implementing modern programming concepts. C# includes all the support for structured, component-based, object-oriented programming that one expects of a modern language built on the shoulders of C++ and Java.The goal of C# is to provide a simple, safe (bugs early in the development process and reliable code), object-oriented, Internet-centric, high-performance language for .NET development. C# is simple because there are relatively few keywords.