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C# ○˒|Definition|1st|20251119205401-00-⌔
C Sharp (programming language) - Wikipedia
C Sharp (programming language)
C# (/ˌsiː ˈʃɑːrp/see SHARP)1 is a general-purpose high-level programming language supporting multiple paradigms. C# encompasses static typing,2 strong typing, lexically scoped, imperative, declarative, functional, generic,2 object-oriented (class -based), and component-oriented programming disciplines.[
The principal designers of the C# programming language were Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Wiltamuth, and Peter Golde from Microsoft.[^1] It was first widely distributed in July 2000[^1] and was later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002 and ISO/IEC (ISO/IEC 23270 and 206193) in 2003. Microsoft introduced C# along with.NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio, both of which are, technically speaking, closed-source. At the time, Microsoft had no open-source products. Four years later, in 2004, a free and open-source project called Mono began, providing a cross-platform compiler and runtime environment for the C# programming language. A decade later, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code (code editor), Roslyn (compiler), and the unified.NET platform (software framework), all of which support C# and are free, open-source, and cross-platform. Mono also joined Microsoft, but was not merged into.NET.
As of November 2025, the most recent stable version of the language is C# 14.456
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
By convention, a number sign is used for the second character in normal text; in artistic representations, sometimes a true sharp sign is used: C♯. However the ECMA 334 standard states: “The name C# is written as the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C (U+0043) followed by the NUMBER SIGN # (U+0023).” ↩
Language versions 1.0, 2.0, and 5.0 are available as ISO/IEC 23270. Beginning with version 7.0, the specification is available as ISO/IEC 20619 ↩
Wagner, Bill. “What’s new in C# 14”. learn.microsoft.com. Retrieved September 13, 2025. ↩
Dollard, Kathleen (November 14, 2023). “Announcing C# 12”. .NET Blog. Archived from the original on November 18, 2023. Retrieved November 18, 2023. ↩
Seth, Gaurav (November 14, 2023). “Announcing.NET 8”. .NET Blog. Archived from the original on November 19, 2023. Retrieved November 18, 2023. ↩
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