Microsoft Visual C# is Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's implementation of the C# specification, included in the Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment from Microsoft. It is used to develop console and graphical user interface applications along with Windows Forms applications, web sites, web applications, and web services in both native code together with managed code for all...

 suite of products. It is based on the ECMA

Ecma International

Ecma International is an international, private non-profit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association changed its name to reflect the organization's global reach and activities...

/ISO

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

 specification of the C# language, which Microsoft also created. While multiple implementations of the specification exist, Visual C# is by far the one most commonly used. In most contexts, an unqualified reference to "C#" is taken to mean "Visual C#."

The term Visual denotes a brand-name relationship with other Microsoft programming languages such as Visual Basic

Visual Basic

Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...

, Visual FoxPro

Visual FoxPro

Visual FoxPro is a data-centric object-oriented and procedural programming language produced by Microsoft. It is derived from FoxPro which was developed by Fox Software beginning in 1984. Fox Technologies merged with Microsoft in 1992, after which the software acquired further features and the...

, Visual J#

J Sharp

Visual J# |sharp]]') programming language is a discontinued transitional language for programmers of Java and Visual J++ languages, so they may use their existing knowledge and applications on .NET Framework....

 and Visual C++

Visual C++

Microsoft Visual C++ is a commercial , integrated development environment product from Microsoft for the C, C++, and C++/CLI programming languages...

. All of these products are packaged with a graphical IDE

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 and support rapid application development

Rapid application development

Rapid application development is a software development methodology that uses minimal planning in favor of rapid prototyping. The "planning" of software developed using RAD is interleaved with writing the software itself...

 of Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

-based applications.

Visual C# is currently used in development of Windows and Xbox Live games via Microsoft XNA

Microsoft XNA

Microsoft XNA is a set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates video game development and management. XNA attempts to free game developers from writing "repetitive boilerplate code" and to bring different aspects of game production into a single system...

, which allows game developers to create and share their games with other gamers. Visual C# is also heavily used by ASP.NET web sites and standalone applications based on the .NET Framework.

External links

• Visual C# and Visual C# Express - at C# Online.NET