Recently I’ve been asked what features I like most in C#. I’ve been working with it for almost 14 years now (since the end of 2000), and today I use it almost daily along with Java and JavaScript (in Node.js). It’s so fun to witnesses the growth of the language – from the birth to teenage age and to maturity.

 C# is a very nice language and I find the following features of it most useful:

– Generics brings the concept of type parameters. This makes code very clean especially when dealing with collections.

– Linq – added standard and easy-learning pattern for querying and updating data. It’s like SQL for C# collections. Linq allows developers to express what should be done instead of how (forget about for, while loops). I especially like to use it in the form of Lambda Expression. Although .NET framework has a functional language – F# – the ability to do functional programming in C# is great. 

– Parallel Processing – 

– Tasks. If you’ve ever done threading in C# (or any other language for that matter) the simplicity that Task provides in dealing with threading is a life saver. There is a reason why Microsoft recommends that we use Tasks instead of Thread/ThreadPool directly – not only it will work better, but code can be written much faster and cleaner.

– async / await

– dynamics. There is a reason why dynamically typed languages (Ruby, Python, JavaScript) are so popular. If you have never experience before it feels awkward at first, but then you get it and have a blast. I was working with dynamic language since early 90th, and having this functionality as part of C# makes life much easier in some cases.

With these features been around for a while it sometimes amuses me how often I still see that engineers don’t use them. Benefits