History

C# was Developed by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft as part of .NET framework initiative in the late 2000's.

The name comes from musical notation where a sharp symbol(#) sets the note higher in pitch by one semitone. The story of naming this language is similar to that of C++, where the ++ being the increment operator, was meant to say that C++ is an improvement over C.

Some say that the sharp symbol also resembles four ”+” symbols (in a 2x2 grid), implying that the language is an increment of C++.

In its early 1.0 version, C# looked a lot like its predecessor Java (released in 1991). But it has grown quickly since then. With extensive support from Microsoft promoting C# as its primary .NET framework language, it gained a large audience and became one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

At the time of writing this chapter, C# version stands at 7.0 and is continuously evolving.