The history of C#
C# development started at Microsoft in the late 1990s by a team led by Anders Hejlsberg. Initially, it was called Cool, but when the .NET project was first publicly announced in the summer of 2002, the language was renamed C#. The use of the sharp suffix was intended to denote that the language is an increment of C++, which, along with Java, Delphi, and Smalltalk, acted as an inspiration for the CLI and the C# language design.
The first version of C#, called 1.0, was made available in 2002 bundled with .NET Framework 1.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2002. Since then, major and minor increments of the language have been released together with new versions of .NET Framework and Visual Studio. The following table lists all of the versions and some of the key features for each of these releases:
The latest version of the language at the time of writing, 8.0, is being released with .NET Core 3.0. Although most features will...
