Table of Contents

A Programmer s Introduction to C# 2.0 Third Edition ERIC GUNNERSON AND NICK WIENHOLT A Programmer s Introduction to C# 2.0, Third Edition Copyright (c) 2005 by Eric Gunnerson and Nick Wienholt All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. ISBN (pbk): 1-59059-501-7 Printed and bound in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Trademarked names may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Lead Editor: Jon Hassell Technical Reviewer: Gavin Smyth Editorial Board: Steve Anglin, Dan Appleman, Ewan Buckingham, Gary Cornell, Tony Davis, Jason Gilmore, Jonathan Hassell, Chris Mills, Dominic Shakeshaft, Jim Sumser Assistant Publisher: Grace Wong Project Manager: Kylie Johnston Copy Edit Manager: Nicole LeClerc Copy Editor: Kim Wimpsett Production Manager: Kari Brooks-Copony Compositors: Susan Glinert and Wordstop Technologies (P) Limited Proofreader: Elizabeth Berry Indexer: Broccoli Information Management Artist: April Milne Cover Designer: Kurt Krames Interior Designer: Van Winkle Design Group Manufacturing Manager: Tom Debolski Distributed to the book trade in the United States by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 233 Spring Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10013, and outside the United States by Springer-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Tiergartenstr. 17, 69112 Heidelberg, Germany. In the United States: phone 1-800-SPRINGER, fax 201-348-4505, e-mail orders@springeronline.com, or visit http://www.springeronline.com. Outside the United States: fax +49 6221 345229, e-mail orders@springeronline.com, or visit http://www.springeronline.com. For information on translations, please contact Apress directly at 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 219, Berkeley, CA 94710. Phone 510-549-5930, fax 510-549-5939, e-mail info@apress.com, or visit http://www.apress.com. The information in this book is distributed on an as is basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author(s) nor Apress shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this work. The source code for this book is available to readers at http://www.apress.com in the Downloads section. v Contents at a Glance Foreword to the Third Edition ... xxiii Foreword to the First Two Editions ... xxv About the Authors ... xxvii About the Technical Reviewer ... xxix Acknowledgments ... xxxi Introduction ... xxxiii CHAPTER 1 Object-Oriented Basics ... 1 CHAPTER 2 The .NET Runtime Environment ... 5 CHAPTER 3 C# Quick Start and C# Development ... 11 CHAPTER 4 Exception Handling ... 21 CHAPTER 5 Classes 101 ... 31 CHAPTER 6 Base Classes and Inheritance ... 39 CHAPTER 7 Member Accessibility and Overloading ... 53 CHAPTER 8 Other Class Details ... 61 CHAPTER 9 Structs (Value Types) ... 79 CHAPTER 10 Interfaces ... 85 CHAPTER 11 Versioning and Aliases ... 99 CHAPTER 12 Statements and Flow of Execution ... 105 CHAPTER 13 Variable Scoping and Definite Assignment ... 113 CHAPTER 14 Operators and Expressions ... 119 CHAPTER 15 Conversions ... 129 CHAPTER 16 Arrays ... 139 CHAPTER 17 Generics ... 145 CHAPTER 18 Strings ... 157 CHAPTER 19 Properties ... 169 CHAPTER 20 Indexers, Enumerators, and Iterators ... 179 CHAPTER 21 Enumerations ... 199 vi ■CONTENTS AT A GLANCE CHAPTER 22 Attributes ... 207 CHAPTER 23 Delegates and Anonymous Methods ... 217 CHAPTER 24 Events ... 229 CHAPTER 25 User-Defined Conversions ... 239 CHAPTER 26 Operator Overloading ... 259 CHAPTER 27 Nullable Types ... 267 CHAPTER 28 Other Language Details ... 273 CHAPTER 29 Making Friends with the .NET Framework ... 283 CHAPTER 30 System.Array and the Collection Classes ... 293 CHAPTER 31 Threading and Asynchronous Operations ... 315 CHAPTER 32 Execution-Time Code Generation ... 341 CHAPTER 33 Interop ... 365 CHAPTER 34 .NET Framework Overview ... 375 CHAPTER 35 Windows Forms ... 403 CHAPTER 36 DiskDiff: More Sophistication ... 417 CHAPTER 37 Practical DiskDiff ... 431 CHAPTER 38 Deeper into C# ... 449 CHAPTER 39 Defensive Programming ... 473 CHAPTER 40 Tips for Real-World Code ... 485 CHAPTER 41 The Command-Line Compiler ... 493 CHAPTER 42 C# Compared to Other Languages ... 497 CHAPTER 43 C# Resources and the Future ... 515 INDEX ... 517

About the Author

Eric Gunnerson is a software developer working at Microsoft. He is a past C# Test Lead, C# Program Manager, and member of the C# Language Design Team. He s been a developer for longer than he cares to admit, and has worked on everything from microcontrollers to minicomputers. In his spare time, he enjoys writing about himself in the third person.