Book excerpt: Appropriate for all basic-to-intermediate level courses in Visual C# 2008 programming. Created by world-renowned programming instructors Paul and Harvey Deitel, Visual C# 2008 How to Program, Third Edition introduces all facets of the C# 2008 language hands-on, through hundreds of working programs. This book has been thoroughly updated to reflect the major innovations Microsoft has incorporated in Visual C# 2008 and .NET 3.5; all discussions and sample code have been carefully audited against the newest Visual C# language specification. The many new platform features covered in depth in this edition include: LINQ (Language Integrated Query), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET Ajax and the Microsoft Ajax Library, Silverlight-based rich Internet application development, and creating Web services with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). New language features introduced in this edition: automatic properties, object initializers, partial classes and methods, anonymous methods, Lambda expressions, extension methods, anonymous types, and collection initializers. The Deitels also provide extensively updated coverage of delegates.Students begin by getting comfortable with the free C# Express 2008 IDE and basic Visual C# syntax. Next, they build their skills one step at a time, mastering control structures, classes, objects, methods, variables, arrays, and the core techniques of object-oriented programming. With this strong foundation in place, the Deitels introduce more sophisticated techniques, including searching, sorting, data structures, generics, and collections. Throughout, the authors show students how to make the most of Microsoft's Visual Studio tools. A series of appendices provide essential programming reference material on topics ranging from number systems to the Visual Studio Debugger, UML 2 to Unicode and ASCII.