New C# 2005 Overview Released

Microsoft has released a new functional overview of the new features available in C# 2005 (Whidbey). Improvements include language enhancements, productivity enhancements, debugger features, and new platform features.

C# 2.0 introduces several language extensions, including Generics, Anonymous Methods, Iterators, Partial Types, and Nullable Types.

Generics permit classes, structs, interfaces, delegates, and methods to be parameterized by the types of data they store and manipulate. Generics are useful because they provide stronger compile-time type checking, require fewer explicit conversions between data types, and reduce the need for boxing operations and run-time type checks.

Anonymous methods allow code blocks to be written “in-line” where delegate values are expected. Anonymous methods are similar to lambda functions in the Lisp programming language. C# 2.0 supports the creation of “closures” where anonymous methods access surrounding local variables and parameters.

Iterators are methods that incrementally compute and yield a sequence of values. Iterators make it easy for a type to specify how the foreach statement will iterate over its elements.
Partial types allow classes, structs, and interfaces to be broken into multiple pieces stored in different source files for easier development and maintenance. Additionally, partial types allow separation of machine-generated and user-written parts of types so that it is easier to augment code generated by a tool.

Nullable types represent values that possibly are unknown. A nullable type supports all values of its underlying type plus an additional null state. Any value type can be the underlying type of a nullable type. A nullable type supports the same conversions and operators as its underlying type, but additionally provides null value propagation similar to SQL.

Productivity Enhancements:
Check out the link http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/2005/overview/productivity/


Debugger Enhancements:
Check out the link
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/2005/overview/debugger/

Platform Enhancements:
Check out the link
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/2005/overview/platform/