New C# features

It's not just the frameworks and libraries that have been worked on. The underlying language also had some nice new features added. We will focus on C# here as it is the most popular language for the Common Language Runtime (CLR). Other options include Visual Basic and the functional programming language F#.

C# is a great language to work with, especially when compared to a language such as JavaScript. Although JavaScript is great for many reasons (such as its ubiquity and the number of frameworks available), the elegance and design of the language is not one of them. We will cover JavaScript later in the book.

Many of these new features are just syntactic sugar, which means they don't add any new functionality. They simply provide a more succinct and easier-to-read way of writing code that does the same thing.